Professor Emmanuel Abaka, Dean of faculty of Languages, University of Education, Winneba (UEW), has called on West African governments to enact and promulgate good language policies to facilitate the development of their countries.
He said: “Any country that is linguistically heterogeneous is invariably undeveloped or at best semi-developed, whereas any country that is highly developed has considerable language uniformity”.
Professor Abaka said this at the opening of the Eighth Inter-University Conference for Co-existence of Languages in West Africa in Winneba on Wednesday.
Over 100 professors, senior lectures and lectures from 14 universities in five English and French speaking West African countries are attending the conference.
The six-day conference is under the theme: “National Development through Language Education”.
The participants are from public and private universities in Ghana, Benin, Burkina Faso, Togo, and Nigeria.
It is organised by the Department of French Education in collaboration with the Faculty of Languages of the UEW.
The conference is to serve as an academic forum for re-enforcing the training capacity of lectures in areas of teaching and research.
Prof. Abaka said no country had ever developed employing a foreign language as its official language.
Professor Akwasi Asabere-Ameyaw, Vice Chancellor of the UEW, in his welcoming address, expressed the hope that participants would come out with papers that would serve the academic and intellectual agenda among other things.
Madam Alexina Arthur, Lecturer of the Department of Modern languages of the University of Ghana, stressed the need for students to learn foreign languages to enable them to participate easily and successfully on the international scene.