Why does Africa have so many languages?
csmonitor.com
Why does Africa have so many languages?
1–10 of 16 posts
Re: Why does Africa have so many languages?
#2A glib answer would be "because it's a huge continent"? In fairness, I think this is actually a pretty decent article about a complex topic, but I can't help but think it's the wrong question to ask.
Re: Why does Africa have so many languages?
#3I lived in Papua New Guinea for two years, where linguistic diversity is higher than any other country.
There was however a few languages that everyone spoke. Tok Pisin was a pidgin language spoke by almost everyone, and English (due to it being the language used in schools) ran a close second.
Despite the relatively few languages spoken in Europe, we don't have a universal dialect that everyone understands. The vast majority of us are monolingual.
Re: Why does Africa have so many languages?
#4I lived in Papua New Guinea for two years, where linguistic diversity is higher than any other country. There was however a few languages that everyone spoke. Tok Pisin was a pidgin language spoke by almost everyone, and English (due to it being the language used in schools) ran a close second. Despite the relatively few languages spoken in Europe, we don't have a universal dialect that everyone understands. The vast…
> we don't have a universal dialect that everyone understands.
Isn't that the role filled by English?
Re: Why does Africa have so many languages?
#5A glib answer would be "because it's a huge continent"? In fairness, I think this is actually a pretty decent article about a complex topic, but I can't help but think it's the wrong question to ask.
How is it the wrong question to ask? What value judgement are you making? I'm curious because its hard to imagine any question being wrong(to ask) if its asked genuinely and without malice.
Re: Why does Africa have so many languages?
#6A glib answer would be "because it's a huge continent"? In fairness, I think this is actually a pretty decent article about a complex topic, but I can't help but think it's the wrong question to ask.
If one were to employ the same test/criteria, I wonder how many languages are spoken in North America? It also makes me wonder how many people in North America don't speak any significant amount of Spanish or English. There are some for various reasons, but not many. At the same time, the article refers to an SSIL document which lists USA as having 422 living languages--which would be 7th in the world for most active languages. However, in practice most public life is carried out in Spanish or English. Will the same phenomenon in store for Africa?
Re: Why does Africa have so many languages?
#7A glib answer would be "because it's a huge continent"? In fairness, I think this is actually a pretty decent article about a complex topic, but I can't help but think it's the wrong question to ask.
How is it the wrong question to ask? What value judgement are you making? I'm curious because its hard to imagine any question being wrong(to ask) if its asked genuinely and without malice.
Sure, completely agreed. I didn't mean 'wrong' in terms of being ethically wrong. I think the article itself contains a more insightful question: "Is genetic diversity linked to linguistic diversity?"
Re: Why does Africa have so many languages?
#8A glib answer would be "because it's a huge continent"? In fairness, I think this is actually a pretty decent article about a complex topic, but I can't help but think it's the wrong question to ask.
"because it's a huge continent and humans have been there a very long time"
Re: Why does Africa have so many languages?
#9A glib answer would be "because it's a huge continent"? In fairness, I think this is actually a pretty decent article about a complex topic, but I can't help but think it's the wrong question to ask.
Also, while there are many languages in Africa, the number of coherent families isn't necessarily that large. For example, Bambara is part of a larger family of languages that are more like highly-divergent dialects (or so I'm given to understand -- I was lucky to communicate at all in my broken Bambara and pidgin French). By the same token, Arabic has a multitude of spoken dialects that are barely intelligible to each other.
I also think that the question suffers by failing to compare the range of languages found in other regions. The geographic distribution of the Indo-European language facility is comparable to Africa and contains around 500 known languages, though it is likely that at least as many were extinguished through various means (peaceful and not) over the centuries. Linguistic diversity is the norm, not the exception, though large-scale political consolidation tends to mask this.
Re: Why does Africa have so many languages?
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it the wrong question to ask? What value judgement are you making? I'm curious because its hard to imagine any question being wrong(to ask) if its asked genuinely and without malice.
Sure, completely agreed. I didn't mean 'wrong' in terms of being ethically wrong. I think the article itself contains a more insightful question: "Is genetic diversity linked to linguistic diversity?"
> I think the article itself contains a more insightful question: "Is genetic diversity linked to linguistic diversity?"
Why is that an insightful question? I wouldn't have expected a strong correlation, and from the article, there doesn't appear to be one.
At the risk of being too dismissive, I thought the reasons for linguistic diversity were already well known (that is, physical and political separation and a lack of trade/communication).