This chapter investigates friendships and children’s wellbeing in the early years of schooling. Having a friend, and being a friend, is closely connected to children’s health and wellbeing in the early years. Friendship safeguards children from social isolation and is associated with academic attainment and social success. In early childhood, children most often make friends through play, having common interests and doing shared activities.Using children’s direct accounts and visual representations of their friendships, we explore characteristics of friendship and the strategies that children use to make friends and manage disputes as they negotiate their social and emotional relationships through play and shared spaces. Three aspects of friendships are evident in the children’s accounts: friendship is enduring; friendship is a mutual relationship; and friendship involves an emotional investment. This chapter provides educators with an understanding of the important role of friendships in young children’s everyday lives, and to their happiness and wellbeing in the early years.

Standard languages have high symbolic significance but little actual use in highly multilingual national contexts. This chapter explores the tension between the reification of fluid language use into codified languages and fluid and variable communicative practices in speech and writing in a number of African sociolinguistic settings. Starting with the observation that the notion of standard languages and of the ethnolinguistic groups using them goes back to the colonial period, I proceed to investigate different visions of language as they emerge from the writing conventions and language visions of colonial/anticolonial actors from this time, focusing on a case study on the West Afrian Manding cluster. I continue to explore attitudes to purity and standardization in contemporary scripts and language policies and in written and spoken language use, also including so-called mixed registers such as Urban Wolof and Sheng. I end the chapter by presenting innovative approaches to bypassing the standard (yet maintaining compatibility with it), focusing on the LILIEMA programme for inclusive education in a highly multilingual region of Senegal.