Frank Jablonka
The present article is an attempt to conceptualize Senghor’s poetic writing from a point of view of contact and variational linguistics. According to Senghor’s own formation in linguistics and anthropology, we take into account a perspective of anthropological linguistics of language contact between French and African languages in Senegal. By virtue of the colonial and postcolonial contact situation emerges an interlectal variety of French which impacts the literary writing. At the same time, Senghor’s poetic writing in an interlectal variety, which integrates also elements from Arabic and classical and modern European languages, enriches the repertoire of Francophony, one of his main political projects. The emerging French literary interlect represents a form of appropriation of African culture as a strategic aspect of Senghor’s civilizational project of Négritude.