From the earliest studies on French in Africa, the main goal was didactic during the first post-colonial period, research interests have been diverse in each country, as a function of the needs and evolution of French–themselves depending on their relationships with the language. Yet up to the beginning of the 21st Century, the dominant frameworks in descriptive linguistics, sociolinguistics and the study of contact languages were those developed by French scholars in collaboration with African researchers or re-worked on the basis of North American models in terms of various strands of African fieldwork. For some years now, the contribution of African studies has been both original and particularly useful for general linguistics : contextualized studies of the ways in which language functions, work on youth languages and mixed languages, and action research which associates French and African languages in the interests of development.