The African Academy of Languages, ACALAN has been actively working to fulfill its mandate of promoting and developing African languages with the aim of making them official languages, languages of instruction and tools of African integration and development.

To achieve this lofty task, (ACALAN) held a consultative meeting with its working structures and member state in Lome, Togo on October 2nd to 5th.

Participants at the meeting deliberated on ways of perfecting modalities of implementing the Language Plan of Action for Africa, strengthening partnership with member states and offered clarity on the role of member states in ACALAN's language development initiatives. Issues relating to vehicular cross-border language commission and the operation of the National Language Structures were discussed.

Next up for ACALAN was the workshop on "Harmonization of the Writing System of the Betifang, Lingala, Kinkongo Vehicular Cross-border Languages" which took place in Congo.

The workshop was able harmonize orthographic practices, developed a standardized form of writing for each of the languages and set a harmonized rule of grammar for the languages in question.

Without resting on the success recorded through the harmonization exercise, ACALAN  organized another workshop geared towards the production of a linguistic atlas of the region.

The workshop took place between October 30 and November 1 in Abidjan, bringing together top cartographers and the National Bureau of Statistics of ECOWAS member states and the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.

The linguistic atlas project was able to produce precise information on the number of languages spoken in the West African region, their interrelations and dialectical variations with participants providing information population and language distribution in their respective countries.

The workshop on the Linguistic Atlas was then followed with another workshop to harmonize the Kinyarwanda/Kirundi, Kiswahili, Luganda, Malagasy and Somali Vehicular Cross-border Languages, from 13 to 15 November 2018 in Kampala, Uganda.

At the workshop, the harmonization of the differences in orthographic practice; creation of a writing system for the languages, development of standardize form of writing for each of the languages, development a minimum lexicon for each language and development of harmonized rules of grammar for each of the language were achieved.