The Diplomat
The Cervantes Institute will host from tomorrow, Tuesday, until the 18th, the 2nd Africa-Spain Hispanists’ Meeting ‘The African imprint in Spanish’, an event that brings together some thirty specialists to reflect on the influence of Spanish and African languages in both directions, especially in Hispanic literature and cultures.
The Secretary General of the Cervantes Institute, Carmen Noguero, the Secretary of State for Foreign and Global Affairs, Ángeles Moreno Bau, and the Director of Casa África, José Segura Clavell, will open the conference, which is a continuation of the first edition held in 2019 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, reports Europa Press.
For three days, experts from different academic, cultural and institutional fields from Senegal, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Cameroon, Ivory Coast and Spain will address the influence of African languages on Spanish and Spanish-language culture, mainly in Latin America. The main theme of this 2nd Meeting will be the African imprint on Spanish, everything that is African in Spanish and culture in Spanish, and which has influenced and blended into Hispanic cultures: the presence of negritude in literature in Spanish, literature in Spanish by African authors outside Africa and the role of women in African narrative in Spanish.
The fixed section, already developed at the 2019 meeting, will also be maintained, dealing with the teaching of Spanish in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region with a growing number of students that currently has more than 1,840,000 students of Spanish, in a total of 26 countries.
Spanish is studied in 32 countries on the African continent, with a total number of learners of Spanish as a foreign language of more than two million people. Of these, 1.8 million are students in Sub-Saharan African countries, in a total of 26 countries in the region.
In Equatorial Guinea, 906,779 people belong to the group of native speakers of Spanish, 318,598 people belong to the group of limited proficiency in the language, and 28,895 students of Spanish make up the group of learners of the language.
