What's the language of Africa?

15 September 2005

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"Say something in African." That's something you might hear from a college freshman, talking to an African exchange student. But, of course there is no single "African language." By one count there are over 2000 distinctly separate tongues on the continent. Some are spoken by very small groups of people, maybe in only one village; others are spoken by millions. The thing to remember is that Africa, especially south of the Sahara, is one of the most multilingual regions in the world.

But what about a shared "language of Africa" like Swahili? Well, a large number of people do speak Swahili, but it's limited mostly to east Africa. Africa is a vast continent and even the most widely spoken languages cover only sub-regions.

Because of the sheer number of African languages there's a lot that we're still learning about them. Since most are only spoken tongues, with an oral tradition but no written record, they’re not easy to document. And to what extent are they related? It wasn't until 1963 that the linguist Joseph Greenberg suggested they fall into just four families: a huge one of over 1300 languages spread across most of sub-Saharan Africa; a north African family that includes Hebrew, Arabic, and Amharic; a group in the middle around Chad and Uganda; and a small group called Khoisan, near the Kalahari desert.

So what are these languages like? You've probably heard an occasional word like "harambee," from Swahili, meaning pulling together, which was a rallying cry in Kenya. Or maybe the songs of Miriam Makeba. Or dialogue in the film, Amistad, in which characters portraying African slaves speak Mende, a language of present-day Sierra Leone. Because of their diversity, no language represents them all, so I'm going to pick Xhosa, because I like that click at the beginning of it. Here's a sample from the sound track of a new film version of Bizet's Carmen, spoken and sung entirely in Xhosa:

[insert Xhosa sample]

The sounds and grammar of African languages are often very different from ones we're more familiar with. Many of them, such as Yoruba in Nigeria, use tones, much like Chinese, to distinguish meaning. And the structures are sometimes intricate. I always think of German as complex, with three genders to classify nouns; but the Fulani language of West Africa has over two dozen ways to do that. Other languages have unique sounds, such as that click in Xhosa. It's been suggested that clicks are surviving remnants of the earliest sounds we humans made in communicating -- which would make these languages some of the oldest ones we know.

Old yes, but in no sense primitive. Many Westerners still believe that African languages are less capable of expressing complex thought than European tongues. I wonder what they'd say about a translation of the theory of relativity in Wolof, a language of Senegal and Gambia.

Now, with all those different languages, how do people communicate? The answer is: they find a way. Close to home, Africans commonly use more than one language in daily life. Further away, they may rely on a lingua franca like Swahili, English, or French -- or maybe a pidgin language. But with population growth and social change, language hurdles loom larger. African languages are in flux, especially in cities, where diverse peoples come together. Some are losing speakers as school systems stop -- or never started -- teaching in them. Economic incentives favor English or French. But African tongues are firmly part of the daily life, cultural identities and economic activity of the continent. So what's the future of "saying something in African"? There are probably as many answers to that as there are languages in Africa.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Dr. Donald Osborn, an independent scholar and specialist in African languages. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. Visit us at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

Comments

Posted by: Kipnyango at September 23, 2005 01:23 PM

Posted by: Angel at May 14, 2006 03:33 PM