The Senior Programmes and Project officer of the African Academy of Languages, ACALAN, Dr. Babajide Ojo has highlighted some of the major projects ahead of the Academy.

Speaking in an exclusive interview with CEOAfrica recently in Brazaville, Dr Ojo revealed that the academy which is an organ of the African Union charged with the responsibility of promoting African languages and using African languages as a tool for integration and development of Africa, have a long list of programs which it intends to implement in its quest to develop African languages.

He said, "when we are talking about developing languages, we are talking about copus planning, status planning. One of the things we do in ACALAN is to make sure that these cross-border languages are harmonized so that same book can be used across the region and again, within the education sector it will bring some kind of harmony. That is why we are here in Congo, bringing the experts together to come and brainstorm on how they are going to harmonize the writing system, the orthography system of those languages and they are working on it.

"After harmonization has been done, it doesn’t end there, we are still going to do advocacy. We need the media, the ministries of education, the policy makers so that those materials can be accepted for use in their respective countries. We then take the books for publication. The harmonized orthography can be used as a teaching material within the school system and also in the media."

He also noted that the academy will also be working on copus development system. Furthermore, Dr. Ojo noted that the Prize for Excellence for African Writers will also be held to recognise the contributions of African writers to the development of the languages while also revealing that the Linguistic Atlas of Africa is another major project the academy is undertaking to know exactly how many languages are spoken in each country in Africa, number of people speaking each language and where a particular language is spoken.