African Languages – What is Spoken Where?

April 10, 2009 — lingoproz

Found on About.com on 10 April 2009
By Anouk Zijlma

There are literally thousands of indigenous languages spoken in Africa and many more dialects. Every African country you visit will no doubt be home to more than a dozen (if not several hundred) languages, even the smaller countries. But because of the sheer amount of linguistic diversity, every African country has an official language (or 11 in the case of South Africa) which acts as the lingua franca for (at least) a reasonably sized region.

Since almost every African country was at one time a colony, speaking English, Portuguese, or French will also help you communicate. Many Africans will speak Creole or pidgin versions of these European languages and they may not be so easy to understand when you first hear them.

Arabic is very handy in Northern Africa and Swahili will help you get by in much of East Africa.

Learning a few phrases in a local language will do much to endear you to the local population and help you get around. If you’re spending more than a few weeks in a country it is definitely worth buying a phrasebook.

What African Language is Spoken Where?

Below you’ll find a list of the major languages spoken in the more common African travel destinations. As a general rule, the more rural a place is, the less likely you are to get by with just English, Portuguese or French.

Angola
Official Language: Portuguese
Other languages spoken in Angola are mostly Bantu languages which include Umbundu, Nyemba and Chokwe.

Benin
Official Language: French
Other languages spoken in Benin include English (in tourist areas), Fon and Yoruba (south), Beriba and Dendi (north).

Botswana
Official Language: English
The principal language spoken in Botswana is Setswana (or Tswana) which is spoken by 90 of the population.

Cameroon
Official Languages: English and French
French is more widely spoken than English but a combination of the two is becoming more widespread — frananglais. Over 200 hundred languages are spoken in Cameroon from the Bantu and Sudanic groups.

Egypt
Official Language: Arabic
Modern Standard Arabic is widely understood in Egypt and is used by the media and Government. But most Egyptians on the streets of Cairo and Luxor speak a colloquial Arabic that is unique to Egypt. English is spoken by many people in the major tourist areas and some French as well.

Ethiopia
Official Language: Amharic
Other important languages in Ethiopia include Oromo, Somali and Tigrinya. English is taught in schools and many people will know a few words.

Gabon
Official Language: French
Other important languages in Gabon include Fang, Mbere, Punu and Sira.

The Gambia
Official Language: English
Other important lanugages in The Gambia include Wolof, Mandinka and Pulaar.

Ghana
Official Language: English
Other important languages (out of 79) spoken in Ghana include Twi, Ga, Ewe, Dagari and Dagbani.

Kenya
Official Languages: English and (Ki)Swahili
Other important languages include Luo, Kikuyu, Luyia and Kamba. Young urbanites often speak Sheng which is a based on Swahili but uses words from many other languages.

Libya
Official Language: Arabic
If you’re traveling to Libya you should pack an Arabic phrase book since little else is spoken, especially outside the main cities.

Madagascar
Official Language: Malagasy and French
Malagasy is spoken by everyone in Madagascar and many people also speak French especially in the business and government sectors.

Malawi
Official Language: English
Chichewa is probably spoken more widely by most of the population than English in Malawi, but you can get by without it for the most part. Yao and Tumbuka are commonly spoken around the lakeshore.

Mali
Official Language: French
Bambara is the most commonly spoken language in Mali, other languages include Tamashek, Songhai and Fulfulde.

Morocco
Official Language: Arabic
As in Egypt, Modern Standard Arabic is widely understood but Moroccans on the streets of Casablanca and Marrakech speak a colloquial Arabic called Darija that is unique to Morocco and influenced by the Berber languages also commonly spoken throughout the country. French is useful as many educated people will speak it and it may help you get from place to place. English is not commonly spoken or understood in Morocco.

Mozambique
Official Language: Portuguese
Other important languages (out of the 43 mostly Bantu languages) include Lomwe, Makhuwa, Ndau and Tsonga.

Namibia
Official Language: English
While the official language is English, Afrikaans is actually much more widely spoken by Namibians as a second language, even in rural areas. Other important languages in Namibia include Herero, Ovambo, German, Portuguese (in the north) and Nama.

Nigeria
Official Language: English
Other important languages in Nigeria include Hausa (widely spoken throughout northern Nigeria), Yoruba, Ibo, Edo, Idoma, Fulfulde and Efik. Many people, particularly in the south and urban areas, speak a creole or pidgin English similar to Krio in Sierra Leone and Pidgin in Cameroon.

Rwanda
Official Languages: French, English and Kinyarwanda
Rwandans nearly all speak Kinyarwanda as their mother tongue, but Englih and French is also widely understood throughout the country.

Senegal
Official Language: French
The most widely spoken language in Senegal is Wolof. Other important languages include Fula, Soninke, Mandinka, and Bambara.

South Africa
Official Languages: Afrikaans, English, Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele, Venda, Swati, Sesotho, Sepedi, Tsonga and Tswana.
Yes, South Africa actually has 11 official languages. Most people speak their tribal mother tongue as well as some English and Afrikaans. Unofficial languages include San and Nama (Bushmen languages) and Northern Ndebele. Several creole or pidgin languages are also common including Fanagalo (used in the mines) and Tsotsi taal or Isicamtho (used in the townships).

Tanzania
Official Languages: (Ki)Swahili and English
Swahili is more widely spoken outside of the urban areas than English, so it’s useful to pick up a few phrases when traveling in Tanzania. Other major languages spoken in Tanzania include Sukuma, Gogo, Haya, Kwere, Makonde, Mambwe, and Nyamwezi.

Togo
Official Language: French
Other important languages (out of 39) in Togo include Kabye, and Mina. Some English is spoken in the tourist areas.

Tunisia
Official Language: Arabic
French is widely spoken and understood especially in the tourist areas. The Arabic spoken in the streets of Tunisia is similar to that spoken in Morocco, commonly known as Darija.

Uganda
Official Language: English
Most Ugandans speak English as well as an indigenous language, the most common ones are Luganda and (Ki)Swahili. Soga, Chiga and Runyankore are also important languages in Uganda, each have over a million native speakers.

Zambia
Official Language: English
English is widely spoken throughout Zambia, other important languages include Tonga, Bemba, Nyanja (similar to Chichewa) and Lozi.

Zimbabwe
Official Language: English
English is widely spoken throughout Zimbabwe but most Zimbabweans’ first language is either Shona or Ndebele.

Sources
Ethnologue.com
Wikipedia
Lonely Planet Guide Books

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African literature – Oral traditions – The nature of storytelling

April 9, 2009 — lingoproz

Found on Beibee’s blog on 9 April 2009
ByBeibee

African literature

Main

the body of traditional oral and written literatures in Afro-Asiatic and African languages together with works written by Africans in European languages. Traditional written literature, which is limited to a smaller geographic area than is oral literature, is most characteristic of those sub-Saharan cultures that have participated in the cultures of the Mediterranean. In particular, there are written literatures in both Hausa and Arabic, created by the scholars of what is now northern Nigeria, and the Somali people have produced a traditional written literature. There are also works written in Geʿez (Ethiopic) and Amharic, two of the languages of Ethiopia, which is the one part of Africa where Christianity has been practiced long enough to be considered traditional. Works written in European languages date primarily from the 20th century onward. The literature of South Africa in English and Afrikaans is also covered in a separate article, South African literature. See also African theatre.

The relationship between oral and written traditions and in particular between oral and modern written literatures is one of great complexity and not a matter of simple evolution. Modern African literatures were born in the educational systems imposed by colonialism, with models drawn from Europe rather than existing African traditions. But the African oral traditions exerted their own influence on these literatures.

Oral traditions » The nature of storytelling

The storyteller speaks, time collapses, and the members of the audience are in the presence of history. It is a time of masks. Reality, the present, is here, but with explosive emotional images giving it a context. This is the storyteller’s art: to mask the past, making it mysterious, seemingly inaccessible. But it is inaccessible only to one’s present intellect; it is always available to one’s heart and soul, one’s emotions. The storyteller combines the audience’s present waking state and its past condition of semiconsciousness, and so the audience walks again in history, joining its forebears. And history, always more than an academic subject, becomes for the audience a collapsing of time. History becomes the audience’s memory and a means of reliving of an indeterminate and deeply obscure past.

Storytelling is a sensory union of image and idea, a process of re-creating the past in terms of the present; the storyteller uses realistic images to describe the present and fantasy images to evoke and embody the substance of a culture’s experience of the past. These ancient fantasy images are the culture’s heritage and the storyteller’s bounty: they contain the emotional history of the culture, its most deeply felt yearnings and fears, and they therefore have the capacity to elicit strong emotional responses from members of audiences. During a performance, these envelop contemporary images—the most unstable parts of the oral tradition, because they are by their nature always in a state of flux—and thereby visit the past on the present.

It is the task of the storyteller to forge the fantasy images of the past into masks of the realistic images of the present, enabling the performer to pitch the present to the past, to visualize the present within a context of—and therefore in terms of—the past. Flowing through this potent emotional grid is a variety of ideas that have the look of antiquity and ancestral sanction. Story occurs under the mesmerizing influence of performance—the body of the performer, the music of her voice, the complex relationship between her and her audience. It is a world unto itself, whole, with its own set of laws. Images that are unlike are juxtaposed, and then the storyteller reveals—to the delight and instruction of the members of the audience—the linkages between them that render them homologous. In this way the past and the present are blended; ideas are thereby generated, forming a conception of the present. Performance gives the images their context and ensures the audience a ritual experience that bridges past and present and shapes contemporary life.

Storytelling is alive, ever in transition, never hardened in time. Stories are not meant to be temporally frozen; they are always responding to contemporary realities, but in a timeless fashion. Storytelling is therefore not a memorized art. The necessity for this continual transformation of the story has to do with the regular fusing of fantasy and images of the real, contemporary world. Performers take images from the present and wed them to the past, and in that way the past regularly shapes an audience’s experience of the present. Storytellers reveal connections between humans—within the world, within a society, within a family—emphasizing an interdependence and the disaster that occurs when obligations to one’s fellows are forsaken. The artist makes the linkages, the storyteller forges the bonds, tying past and present, joining humans to their gods, to their leaders, to their families, to those they love, to their deepest fears and hopes, and to the essential core of their societies and beliefs.

The language of storytelling includes, on the one hand, image, the patterning of image, and the manipulation of the body and voice of the storyteller and, on the other, the memory and present state of the audience. A storytelling performance involves memory: the recollection of each member of the audience of his experiences with respect to the story being performed, the memory of his real-life experiences, and the similar memories of the storyteller. It is the rhythm of storytelling that welds these disparate experiences, yearnings, and thoughts into the images of the story. And the images are known, familiar to the audience. That familiarity is a crucial part of storytelling. The storyteller does not craft a story out of whole cloth: she re-creates the ancient story within the context of the real, contemporary, known world. It is the metaphorical relationship between these memories of the past and the known images of the world of the present that constitutes the essence of storytelling. The story is never history; it is built of the shards of history. Images are removed from historical contexts, then reconstituted within the demanding and authoritative frame of the story. And it is always a sensory experience, an experience of the emotions. Storytellers know that the way to the mind is by way of the heart. The interpretative effects of the storytelling experience give the members of the audience a refreshed sense of reality, a context for their experiences that has no existence in reality. It is only when images of contemporary life are woven into the ancient familiar images that metaphor is born and experience becomes meaningful.

Stories deal with change: mythic transformations of the cosmos, heroic transformations of the culture, transformations of the lives of everyman. The storytelling experience is always ritual, always a rite of passage; one relives the past and, by so doing, comes to insight about present life. Myth is both a story and a fundamental structural device used by storytellers. As a story, it reveals change at the beginning of time, with gods as the central characters. As a storytelling tool for the creation of metaphor, it is both material and method. The heroic epic unfolds within the context of myth, as does the tale. At the heart of each of these genres is metaphor, and at the core of metaphor is riddle with its associate, proverb. Each of these oral forms is characterized by a metaphorical process, the result of patterned imagery. These universal art forms are rooted in the specificities of the African experience.

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News: Linguists raise alarm over extinction of indigenous languages (Igbo)

April 2, 2009 — lingoproz

Found on Vanguard Online on 2 April 2009
By ANAYO OKOLI

Aba—LINGUISTIC Association of Nigeria has raised alarm that indigenous languages in Nigeria are on verge of extinction in preference to foreign languages and culture. Igbo language, the association, laments may be the first casualty.  President of Linguistic Association of Nigeria, Prof Ahmed Amfani, who raised the alarm  in Aba, Abia state, called on Nigerians, especially Ndi Igbo to wake up and save their language.

Stressing the importance of indigenous languages in national development, the association disclosed with joy that Microsoft Nigeria has in collaboration with Alt-I Ibadan,  provided a Language Interface Pack, a glossary in Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba, which he said “is a careful translation of all computer terms in the three languages as an effort towards scientific and technological development of indigenous languages”.

Prof Amfani, the guest lecturer at the first inaugural lecture of Nigerian Languages, and also a lecturer in the Department of Nigerian Languages, University of Nigeria, Aba campus, noted that the role of language in scientific and technological development of any nation is important.

Speaking on the topic, “Indigenous Languages and Development in Nigeria ”, Amfani said however,  that for a language to participate in any meaningful scientific and technological development, such language must be fully codified, which would allow for the writing of scientific terms and the translation of same.

He pointed out that three Nigerian languages, Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba have made head way in this direction because efforts were made to develop them scientifically.

Amfani however, warned that globalization is already affecting a number of indigenous Nigerian languages to the point of extinction.

“With regard to overall development in various spheres, perhaps Nigeria may adopt the Russian solution in which languages were officially chosen to develop in certain fields. Thus government may decide to make Igbo the language of technology, and throughout the country, technology must be taught only in Igbo at all levels of education. Other languages will be selected in the same fashion for the study of other facets of development.

“For languages that could not be used in certain spheres of development for lack of codification and other issues, efforts must be made to document them properly and keep on using them”, Amfani suggested.

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News: BBC launches new language micro-sites for Africa

March 16, 2009 — lingoproz

Found on BBB.co.uk on 16 March 2009

The BBC College of Journalism and the BBC World Service have launched five new language websites for Africa.

They are Hausa, Portuguese for Africa, Somali, Kinyarwanda and Kirundi.

All these language guides draw on the rich experience and expertise of BBC journalists built up over many years.

The BBC is delighted to be able to register this knowledge and share it with journalists across the world.

The micro sites use films, interviews and written materials, to offer experts’ views on the BBC’s use of impartial language.

Today’s launch will bring up the number of the language sites created for Africa to seven.

The language sites for French for Africa and Swahili were launched last year.

Hausa

Hausa is one of the oldest language services in the BBC.

Sulaiman Ibrahim, a language expert who wrote a detailed guide on the use of the correct language translation, feels that it is important to be able to choose the correct term of address.

For example, knowing how to address a man, an older man, a religious figure or a politician without jeopardising the use of impartial language is crucial.

He also feels that the use of orthography in his language is important.

For example, the word “gora” can mean three things, “feast”, “insect” and the word, “if” – and it is only in the context of the sentence that you will understand the correct meaning.

Portuguese for Africa

In recent years the eight Portuguese speaking countries have signed a document urging everyone to unify the way in which the language is written.

Filipe Correia De Sa is the language expert for Para Africa, Portuguese for Africa and he felt that their department needed a place were they could gather their linguistic knowledge and have the opportunity to develop it further.

He has produced the pages on style, impartial writing, independence, pronunciation and much more,
He feels that the Portuguese for Africa site will contribute in the integration of the written form of the Portuguese language.

Somali

A map of East Africa

On the Somali site, Yusuf Garaad Omar gives advice on the use of the language, as one of the dilemmas that broadcasters have is that Somali is spoken in more that three countries, in various dialects.

He gives examples of how to avoid words that are only understood in one particular region and how important it is for journalists to avoid using clichés.

Kinyarwanda and Kirundi

Members of the BBC’s Great Lake team

The Great Lake Service was created by the BBC after the genocide in Rwanda.

Broadcasts are produced in two languages, Kinyarwanda which is mainly spoken in Rwanda and Kirundi, which is mainly spoken in Burundi.

Ally Yusufu Mugenzi who is from Rwanda feels that it is absolutely vital for journalists in his region to understand how to use independent language, and at the same time not be targeted.

Florentine Kwizera who is from Burundi believes that the BBC Great Lake Service has played an important role in the creation of impartial terminology and the site can become a reference point for other journalists working in these languages.

Knowing all the rules about impartiality and independence is integral to the BBC’s journalism and how that applies to various languages is of the upmost importance.

The College of Journalism’s language project started in January 2008 and has since then launched 23 external language sites .

These include Arabic, Farsi, Chinese and Hindi.

The plan is to create micro sits for all the BBC World Service’s languages by April 2009.

Please contact Najiba.Kasraee@bbc.co.uk for further information.

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