Droits linguistiques et droits de l'homme : le cas de la Côte d'Ivoire

Despite the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789, article 11) and its successors the United Nations Charter (1945) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948; article 2), and despite the European Convention on Human Rights (1950; articles 4, 6, 10 11, and 14), in which several articles refer to language or are specifically pertinent to the present argument, numerous African countries, among them Côte d'Ivoire, chose the language of their former colonizer as their official language at the time of their independence. All their institutions, all their legal texts, and all the fundamental rights of their citizens are formulated uniquely and exclusively in a language that the majority of the population neither speaks nor understands. Must human rights and citizens' rights find their expression only in the language of the former colonial power? After a brief historical review, we propose in this paper to reply to this question from the viewpoint of the sociolinguistics of development; that is to say, from the viewpoint of the impact of language policy, or the lack of it, on the everyday lives of citizens, particularly in the case of Côte d'Ivoire. The paper ends with a more general reflection on the behaviour and linguistic attitudes of the state of Côte d'Ivoire and of its citizens.