The aim of the Romance Languages in Africa (RoLA) project is to create a comprehensive panorama of Romance languages on the African continent. Forty African countries are marked by a French, Belgian, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish past, which is sometimes more, sometimes less directly noticeable today. All project partners analyse a given territory according to uniform criteria and a uniform structure. They describe the sociolinguistic situation in a region and outline the linguistic history of the respective Romance language, its regional characteristics and the internal and external language policy of the individual countries. The project thus leads to the first complete description of Romance languages in Africa. Thanks to its coherent and systematic approach, it makes it possible to identify differences and similarities between the individual situations and thus to determine a comprehensive overall picture.