Camille DeJarnett

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2023 - 2024 Academic Year

Estimating the Impact of Language Policy Choice on Civic Participation in Post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan African developing states are, broadly speaking, distinguished by their use of colonial languages for most official purposes. These languages, however, are usually spoken fluently by only a small portion each state’s population, potentially reducing others’ opportunities for civic participation. As a potential remedy to this challenge, widely spoken lingua francas have emerged in most African states—but, these languages generally lack official recognition. Building from extensive interviews on Senegalese language policy, this project uses a field survey and experiment to examine language policy’s impact on civic participation, assessing whether and how policy choices can affect the civic sphere.

Camille DeJarnett, Department of Political Science

Camille DeJarnett is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, an EDGE Fellow, and a PhD candidate in political science at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the significance, both empirical and normative, of language diversity and language policy as factors in political and economic development. She holds a BS in linguistics from MIT, where she received the Ronald McNair Award in recognition of her academic performance and community contributions. Previously, DeJarnett has worked in the fields of expert and strategy consulting, text-to-speech computational linguistics applications, and corporate real estate finance.

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