other African languages

Afrikaans

Arabic

English

French

Portuguese

Spanish

Swahili

This map shows the official languages of the countries in Africa.

I used to think that a national or official language of a country was the language that everyone in that country knew.  What I’ve learned since I started working for Wycliffe is that the reality is much more complicated.  Below is some of what I’ve learned from our linguist colleagues about language use.

In Africa the main official languages are French, English, Arabic and Portuguese, but for the most part African countries host a multilingual environment where different languages are used by different people in different contexts. Sometimes the language listed as the official language of a country is only spoken by 20% or less of the population.  Often other languages are used in the home and maybe even another language or two for trade.

Let’s take Kenya as an example. More than 50 different languages are spoken there.

• Most of these languages would be considered home languages, or languages that people use with their family or with other people from the same ethnic group. It’s often a language people use to express their deep feelings with the people with whom they are closest.  For some people, particularly in rural and remote areas, it may be the only language they know or the only one for which they have an extensive vocabulary.
• Trade languages are languages that different ethnic communities in a geographic zone use to conduct business and communicate with each other.  One of the trade languages used all around Kenya and in many other parts of East Africa is KiSwahili.  However, sometimes other languages are used for this same purpose in smaller geographic areas.
• The official language of Kenya is English (KiSwahili was recently added as another official language).  Official languages are the languages used by the government–in the courts, in official documents, and in other government contexts.  Official languages are often the languages used by the elite and those with the highest levels of education and in areas with a high concentration of ethnic diversity (like large urban slums) where another trade language is not the primary means of communications. In a big city like Nairobi where not only are there many different Kenyan ethnicities coming together but also people from other parts of the Africa and the world, English is more widely spoken than in other cities in Kenya.  Trade languages and official or national languages can be referred to as languages of wider communication or lingua francas because they serve as bidges that allow diverse groups of people to talk to each other.

People in highly urban areas may regularly use three or more languages even in the course of one day. In contrast, someone who lives in a remote or rural area may only know one language well and may have limited vocabulary in another one or two languages.

These become important factors to consider in Bible translation projects and generally in determining what languages to use in ministry.  African church leaders as well as non-African foreigners who have ministries in African countries must carefully consider several factors:

• How well do their audiences know different languages?
• What kinds of vocabulary do they know in each language?
• How do they use each one?
• In which language do they express feelings, ideas or deep truths?
• Does one language have more status than another, and what implications will choosing one language over another have in a given context?

Multilingualism isn’t new. We know from the Bible that Jesus knew several languages: Aramaic (likely his home language), Hebrew, and Greek since it was the trade language of the eastern Roman empire. He probably didn’t know the official language of the Roman empire (Latin) because it was not widely spoken in the eastern part of the empire.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Helping people use and actively engage with Scriptures is an essential part of Wycliffe’s ministry.  However, Wycliffe is not the only organization that is passionate about and involved in Scripture engagement.  Some friends of ours in Nairobi just produced a video about how some AIM (Africa Inland Mission) staff are helping the shepherds of Lesotho engage with God’s Word.

Lesotho [lih-SOO-too] is a small, land-locked and mountainous country located in the south eastern part of South Africa.  It is not part of South Africa, but an independent country of about 2 million people.  At least five languages are spoken there. Wool is one of it’s exports, and boys can be set apart to be tend flocks of sheep from a very young age.

While Lesotho has a high literacy rate, shepherds have a strong oral culture and many are not literate.  AIM staff are helping some shepherds learn to read and write which gives them access to God’s word in their language.  Staff are also hoping to launch a Bible school which will transmit all of its teaching and Scripture orally and through audio.  This will allow shepherds to engage with God’s word and learn to teach others about God’s Word without having to learn to read.

Learn more about orality and ministry to peoples from oral cultures.

Learn more about Scripture engagement ministry.

Popularity: 33% [?]

…that’s the distance, according to Google, between where we lived in Nairobi to the town where we live now.  Oh, and that’s the precise distance…if you walked the whole way.  According to Google, it would take 43 days (24 hours straight) and 15 hours to walk the whole distance.  Their directions include a caution that there may be areas without sidewalks…and there could be some tolls .

We contemplated driving this several times before we made our move.  At first, it seemed like an easier way to transport our luggage.  In the end, it just got too complicated with boarder crossings, multiple transit visas, car insurance for every country, and the possibility that we wouldn’t be able to import our Kenyan car into South Africa.  Alas, it was such an interesting idea in our minds, and I had a whole plan for visiting projects the whole way down and blogging about them.  Instead we just pasted over by air–faster but not nearly as interesting.

Map of the Bantu expansion – created by Mark Dingemanse

This journey has been done, and it was done before the age of airplanes and cars. The Bantu peoples of Africa moved from the areas of modern-day Nigeria and Cameroon east and south to modern-day Kenya and down to South Africa.  The Bantu migration took about 1000 years.  Their language and cultures changed along the way, creating a large group of related Bantu languages and a collection of distinct peoples with some similar and shared cultural characteristics.

Today, there are more than 500 different Bantu languages spoken by more than 200 million Africans in 17 African countries spanning from the equator to South Africa.  About 250 of these languages have no scripture representing about 14 million people.  Most of the Bantu languages without scripture have not been written down.  Many remaining without scripture are located in Tanzania and Uganda.  Learn more about Bantu language projects in Tanzania and Uganda.

The needs for scripture translation into Bantu languages extend beyond Tanzania and Uganda into Kenya, Congo, Angola, Mozambique as well as other countries.  A team has been working on tools to help scripture translation projects in all these languages.  One tool, the Bantu Orthography Manual, seeks to provide some standardization to alphabet creation in Bantu languages that have not been written. A Bantu literacy tool assists with the creation of Bantu literacy primers.  Another tool, PTEST, was developed to assist with the analysis of the sounds in Bantu languages. Each of these tools is increasing the speed at which scripture translations can be made available to Bantu languages.

This macro approach to scripture translation and language development was spurred in part by Vision 2025– a vision to see a Bible translation program in progress in every language still needing one by the year 2025.

View the Bantu language family tree.

Popularity: 67% [?]

With all the machine translation out there, why is so much effort put into translating Bibles?  Why can’t people just use Google translate?

I obviously find some value in machine translation as you can see the sidebar icon for doing machine translations of this blog.  But, if you have used Google Translate or other machine translation tools much, you probably know already that accuracy and readability aren’t quite what they are designed for, and not every language in the world is available on these types of translation tools.

My friend Eddie has done a great post about this very topic:

by Eddie Arthur, on July 29th, 2010

This fascinating (and potentially useful) headline comes from an Indonesian newspaper after Google Translate had finished with it. There were a number of fascinating other things to read, including:

• Train Miniature Rooms
• Success Plastiki Skip the Pacific Ocean
• Salad Dressing Women Arrested Police
• Japanese PM Leadership Doubtful Wife
• Elvis Autopsy Equipment Sale
• The car is moving faster than a bullet
• Car Ice Cream For Dogs

I’m sure that all of these articles made perfect sense in the original and it is possible to work out what some of them mean even in the translation. However, this shows how difficult machine translation really is. None of these headlines comes across as natural English and all of them are difficult to understand. We are not about to see machine translations of the Bible into minority languages any time soon, whatever the pundits say.

Go to Eddie’s blog: www.kouya.net

Popularity: 20% [?]

In this video, Ibrahim, a literacy teacher at the Bredgin refugee camp in eastern Chad, talks about the importance of learning to read and write Massalit.

The Massalit are refugees from the DarFur region of Sudan.  It is a cross-boarder community, so some also have permanent residence in Chad. An SIL team has been assigned to eastern Chad to provide guidence to a literacy program.

Popularity: 51% [?]