Postscript

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% [?]

When we moved to Kenya in 2009, one of the challenges was learning to drive on the left.  The most difficult parts of that transition were learning to feel the edge of the road and remembering to pick the correct lane when turning onto new roads. It’s a skill we were thankful to have already acquired when we moved to South Africa, which is also a left-side drive country.  Kenya and South Africa are two of the 14 countries in Africa which drive on the left.  The remaining 41 countries all drive on the right.

Map created by Benjamin Esham

In the world 76 countries drive on the left and 164 countries drive on the right.  Countries where traffic flows on the left include several island nations and island territories in Europe and North America, a portion of the in countries Africa, most of the countries in the Pacific, and a few countries in Asia and South America.

Which side of the road do you drive on?

Popularity: 24% [?]

See the source map with additional information

Africa is a big continent.  In land mass, it is the second largest continent at almost 12 million sq mi.  It’s land encompasses about 20% of all the world’s land.

It’s population is also the second largest of any continent with 1 billion people or about 15% of the world’s population.

It is not one country, but has more than 50 separate countries and territories.

The climate varies from very hot to mild with a few places cold enough to have snow. It has both vast deserts and dense rain forests.

It has a tremendous variety of plants and animals.  Some of it’s species once had cousins on other continents that went extinct long ago.

It has more than 2000 different languages and is considered by some to be the most multilingual continent in the world.

It has a rich history of ancient empires, explorers and traders, and modern day intellectuals, businessman and peacemakers.

Read more Africa facts.

I didn’t learn much about Africa when I was in school.  The more I learn now, the more I see that Africa is rich, diverse and full of new things to discover.

Africa is big.

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% [?]

Map of African Language Families by Mark Dingemanse

It is estimated that there are about 2,000 languages in Africa, and the spoken languages generally break down into the language families indicated in the picture above. Language communities in Africa range in size from millions of speakers to a few hundred.  Many African countries have several national languages.  Nigeria, for example, has 514 living languages and nine official languages.  Nigeria and central Africa have the greatest concentration of living languages, and are therefore one of three areas of the world with the greatest needs for Bible translation.

Languages are an amazing source of anthropological data.  By studying a language you can learn what’s important to a culture.  Important things have a rich collection of vocabulary, while unimportant things may not have any words at all.  For example, some languages may have multiple words for the verb to carry–for example, a different word for carry on your head, carry on your back, carry with your arms, etc–but not a single word for an electronic device like a computer.

Through language analysis, you can also learn some about the origins and migration of a people.  For example, the Malagasy language of Madagascar has Austronesian roots connecting the people who speak that language with peoples who speak Austronesian languages in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and even Taiwan.

Popularity: 38% [?]