Accelerating African Languages Development through Strategic Improvement of Publishing Landscape: Lessons from Luganda Language Realities

Despite concerted efforts by the African Union and the Independent African States to develop African Languages to the extent of becoming Instructional Languages in schools, there are still gaps which need to be addressed to reach that level. One of the gaps which require strategic intervention is in publishing more literature in the respective African Languages. From this perspective, African countries need to learn from each other and, most importantly to share experiences. In Uganda, the Luganda Language has taken a step in using Luganda in schools and also in publishing. This status quo should be learned by other African languages to support their development. In this paper, we try to discuss factors which have been central in elevating the Luganda Language through publishing. The study used a descriptive research design, thereby analyzing the status, challenges and opportunities of publishing in African languages, using Luganda as a case. We observed that in order to increase public awareness of the use of African languages which leads to increased demand for publishing in them, policymakers should support the use of African languages in the education sector. We conclude that the Luganda language could be used to benchmark how African people could be supported to write and publish in their languages