Resumen de Indigenous language capital and development

Tope Omoniyi

• This position paper presents language capital as an alternative theorization to linguistic capital. It applies to the development and multilingual postcolonial contexts, especially in Africa. It argues that Bourdieu's “linguistic capital” is more applicable to the analysis of the access that is granted or denied on the basis of possession of one rather than another variety of a language. Using demographic statistics made up of human and economic development data from the Human Development Index, the World Bank and the World Development Report, the paper demonstrates the relationships that exist between language and the economy and how the alternative language capital model may be useful for development analysis in subSaharan Africa.