The Languages spoken in Benin

The official language of Benin is French. It is widely used in the doing business, government, universities, and media. Some of the indigenous and community languages spoken include Fon, Bariba, Gun, Pulaar/Fulfulde, Aizo, Yoruba, Tori, Sahou, Dendi/Songhay, Warna, and Sorn’ba. Beninese languages are usually transcribed with a separate letter for every speech sound (phoneme), instead of using diacritics as in French or digraphs as in English.

The Ministry of Basic Education and Literacy in its 2005 stated that the country is still experiencing high illiteracy rate due to high drop-out rate and loss of literacy skills. Benin and Togo are the only 2 African countries that have national policies that support African languages in pre-school education based on survey conducted by the UNESCO Regional Office for Education in Africa in 1985. By 2003, Benin implemented a National Literacy and Adult Education Policy that aims to allow Beninese to use national languages for the advancement of their cultures and active involvement in the democratic process; in order to ensure the implementation of the new policy, a 10-year plan (2006-2015) was developed. Presently, one of the chief challenges Benin is facing is the lack of resources to implement various literary programs on a larger scale.