Since UNESCO’s 1953 report The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education advocated mother-tongue education, language policy has been widely recognised as a critical factor in promoting equitable education, social inclusion, and cultural sustainability. Despite extensive policy commitments, pilot initiatives, and strong empirical evidence demonstrating the pedagogical and socio-political value of African languages, most postcolonial African states continue to privilege former colonial languages as the primary media of instruction and governance. Although existing scholarship has documented challenges in policy implementation, it has largely examined language policy failure through technical, economic, or administrative lenses, thereby overlooking the structural and political forces that sustain linguistic hierarchies. The present study adopts a decolonial theoretical framework informed by the concepts of (de)coloniality, linguistic capital, and epistemic justice to conceptualise language policy as a contested site of power rather than informed planning. The study uses a qualitative critical policy analysis of international declarations, national language policy documents, and selected empirical studies from sub-Saharan Africa to examine the persistent failure of language policy reforms. The findings reveal that the continued dominance of colonial languages is not primarily the result of linguistic planning incapacity but reflects enduring colonial legacies embedded in state institutions, elite reproduction, and global regimes of linguistic legitimacy. These dynamics systematically marginalise African languages and undermine the sustainability of multilingual education reforms. The paper argues that meaningful language policy reform requires re-centring African languages as legitimate instruments of education, governance, and knowledge production, with important implications for linguistic justice, democratic participation, and postcolonial transformation.
Keywords: African languages, Language policy, decolonial theory, linguistic legitimacy, multilingual education
