LANGUAGE DEATHS IN AFRICA

By:Leo Battino

Today thousand of languages are in danger of death all over Africa and the UN tries to save them.

In Africa there are thousands of different languages of different cultures. But today modernization is causing the death of many languages that will be forgotten from their country forever. At first they thought it was a good thing for the economy and tourism to adopt non-native languages, and very useful to travel and have a career. However now that most of the African people that know these languages don’t speak however their mother-language, any more and every year native African languages have less speakers. Today’s African population and the UN wants to “preserve” these cultures and add to the number of the speakers of the native African languages.

Some comments from the BBC news are:

“Languages may unite a group but they also divide” (Simon UK)

My comment on this comment is that it is true and that if someone doesn’t know a language that someone speaks he is divided form them but if he knows it he is united in the group.

“ When a language dies, the world loses a chunk of human creativity ”

(Rebecca, Berkeley, USA)

My comment on this comment is that is very important to keep our origins “alive” and not letting them die because a language is made from human imagination so if it dies we lose one piece of human creativity.

Some people think that dialects are not important and that the national language should be predominant. But even dialects are part of the human creativity and culture so we should save them. The languages that are taking over these aboriginal languages are mostly European languages, and they come most from Latin, and are Portuguese, Afrikaans (a south African language that is spoken by seven million people) ,Spanish, English and French. All of these languages are becoming more popular and countries adopt them as official languages, so these more “international” languages are more convenient to young persons to travel and have a career so they “leave” their original languages to use ”ours”.

The countries that speak French are on the western side of Africa.

Portuguese is spoken in Angola, equatorial guinea, guinea-Bissau, and cape verde.

English is mostly spoken on the eastern and southern side of Africa.  

To try to make a new “continental” language they made the Afrikaans that is a mix of English Swahili, and other African mother tongue.

In conclusion Africa is a full-filled continent with many different languages and cultures which are wonderful and should be saved, because it is part of our history, cultural difference and is part of us.