The landscape of languages in Africa
RECENTLY a naive youngster asked me about the “African language”. I first thought that he was speaking about Afrikaans, the simplified Dutch spoken by many whites and ‘coloureds’ in South Africa. However, I found out that the poor boy was quite convinced that there was only one “African language” spoken natively by all Africans. As we know, nothing could be further removed from truth.
Africa is probably the richest continent as far as the number of languages is concerned, although it is difficult to say what is a language and what is a dialect. There are long chains of dialects changing gradually from village to village, but when you come to the other end of the chain, you will find the local dialect incomprehensible, although you thought that you knew the language. Of course, chains of dialects are not a phenomenon confined to Africa. Many a native speaker of Irish from Kerry would insist that he does not understand anything of what they speak locally in Magheraroarty.
In northern Africa they speak Afroasiatic languages. Arabic is the most important one, of course, but it has developed into numerous dialects under the pressure of other local languages, especially Berber. In what are called the Maghreb countries in north-western Africa, local Arabic dialects are riddled with French words.
Other Afroasiatic languages are Somali and Amharic. The latter is the most important language of Ethiopia. It is an old cultural language and relatively closely related to Arabic, although it is a distinct language. It has its own alphabet, too. As regards Somali, it represents another branch in the Afroasiatic family of languages than Arabic and Amharic. Related languages are spoken in Ethiopia such as the Oromoo or Oromiffa language. It is possible that there are more native speakers of Oromoo than Amharic in Ethiopia, although Amharic is the established cultural language.
Berber, or its different dialects, is the language you are most likely to hear from the original inhabitants of the Sahara. It is difficult to say whether Berber is a language with different dialects, or a group of related languages.
In southern and eastern Africa, the Bantu languages are the most important group. They are most well-known for their classification prefixes of nouns: for instance, in Swahili the prefix m- means “a person”, and thus the word “mzee” means “old man”, while the prefix u- is added to the root word to imply an abstract noun, and so the word “uzee” means “old age”. In Bantu languages there are lots of these classification prefixes.
The southernmost Bantu languages, those spoken in South Africa, make use of so-called click consonants. Miriam Makeba more than anyone made these sounds known in Europe with a song she called her “Click Song” – actually an old folk song from her home country. Her native Xhosa language borrowed these sounds from Khoisan languages, the real native languages of southern Africa.
The most important languages of western Africa such as Yoruba, Igbo, Wolof and the Mande languages are probably somehow related to the Bantu languages, and they all are members of a major language family, the Niger-Congo languages.
Solomana Kante, the most celebrated linguist ever born in Africa, tried to develop his native standard language and alphabet, N’Ko, for the Mande languages or dialects, but as often happened in Africa, this attempt by a local learned man was overshadowed by European languages. Kante was a self-taught person who nevertheless tackled a task that even many trained linguists would be too afraid or unsure to try to solve. Unfortunately, only few people outside Guinea, Senegal, and the Gambia have heard about the feat of this gifted man.
Panu Petteri Höglund is a translator and linguist who studied German, Polish, and Russian at Åbo Akademi University in Finland.
