ABSTRACT
Africa is going through a crucial period of transition which is characterized, inter alia, by tremendous desires and struggles to transform traditional political, economic, and social structures and systems into modern ones in a bid to cope with the exacting demands of the twentieth century. Of the many problems that have to be surmounted by such an effort, those relating to language are in many ways fundamental, and as such must be solved effectively in order to give the processes of national development a chance to succeed by providing the developing nation with: (a) an adequate system of linguistic communication, national identification, and consciousness, and (b) a means to cultural unity (see Knappert, 1964; Mosha, 1967).
