THE AFRO-CREOLE LANGUAGES CODE

The Afro-Creole Languages Code is a companion document to the Declaration, designed for communities, businesses, and schools. It distills the Declaration’s principles into six commitments that everyone can act on:

• Recognise: Afro-Creole languages are complete, sovereign languages that carry African knowledge systems. They are African languages. They emerged from the survival and intellectual creativity of African peoples under conditions of forced displacement, human trafficking, linguicide and genocide.

• Respect: No person should face discrimination, ridicule, punishment, or exclusion for speaking an Afro-Creole language. The stigma attached to these languages is a legacy of white supremacy, enslavement of African peoples, Imperial and colonial linguistic policies, internalised linguistic racism and colonial education.

• Include: Provide services, education, and public information in Afro-Creole languages, including but not limited to schools, workplaces, courtrooms, or public life. Design systems around the languages people actually speak. The exclusion of these languages from institutions reproduces the colonial logic that positioned European languages as the sole vehicles of legitimate knowledge.

• Transmit: Speak your language to your children. Teach it. Write in it. Create in it. The survival of every language depends on whether it is passed from one generation to the next. Every speaker is a custodian.

• Build: Support literature, media, educational materials, and digital content in Afro-Creole languages. Invest in the languages that carry your knowledge. Design the future in the language your ancestors built for you.

Celebrate. Join Afro-Creole Languages Week, 1–8 September, annually.