Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
A different sort of a lingua franca in wide use today
is Swahili, the lingua franca of East Africa. Through
centuries of trade and interaction, Swahili developed
from an African Bantu language mixed with Arabic and
Persian, encompassing 100 million speakers from south-
ern Somalia to northern Mozambique and from coastal
Kenya and Tanzania to Uganda and the East African
Great Lakes region. Swahili has a complex vocabulary
and structure, and while millions of East Africans com-
municate in the language, most still learn and speak a local
language as their fi rst or primary language. Swahili has
gained prominence since 2000 because of its status as the
most widely used African language on the Internet. The
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has a Swahili
language website, and Wikipedia offers pages of its free
encyclopedia in Swahili.
Over time a pidgin language may gain native speak-
ers, becoming the fi rst language children learn in the
home. When this happens, we call it a creolized or Creole
language. A
Creole language
is a pidgin language that
has developed a more complex structure and vocabulary
and has become the native language of a group of people.
The word
Creole
stems from a pidgin language formed
in the Caribbean from English, French, and Portuguese
languages mixed with the languages of African slaves.
The language became more complex and became the fi rst
language of people in the region, replacing the African
languages.
Pidgin and Creole languages are important unify-
ing forces in a linguistically divided world. They tend
to be simple and accessible, and therefore disseminate
rapidly. In Southeast Asia a trade language called Bazaar
Malay is heard from Myanmar (Burma) to Indonesia and
from the Philippines to Malaysia; it has become a lingua
franca in the region. A simplifi ed form of Chinese also
serves as a language of commerce even beyond the bor-
ders of China.
Poland in Europe; and Lesotho in Africa. Even these
countries, however, have small numbers of people who
speak other languages; for example, more than a half-
million Koreans live in Japan. In fact, as a result of
migration and diffusion, no country is truly monolingual
today. English-speaking Australia has more than 180,000
speakers of Aboriginal languages. Predominantly
Portuguese-speaking Brazil has some 1.5 million speak-
ers of Amerindian languages.
Countries in which more than one language is in
use are called
multilingual states
. In some of these
countries, linguistic fragmentation refl ects strong cul-
tural pluralism as well as divisive forces. This is true in
former colonial areas where colonizers threw together
peoples speaking different languages, as happened in
Africa and Asia.
Multilingualism takes several forms. In Canada
and Belgium, the two major languages each dominate
particular areas of the country. In multilingual India,
the country's offi cial languages generally correspond
with the country's States (Fig. 6.17). In Peru, centuries
of acculturation have not erased the regional identities
of the American Indian tongues spoken in the Andean
Mountains and the Amazonian interior, and of Spanish,
spoken on the coast.
Offi cial Languages
Countries with linguistic fragmentation often adopt
an
offi cial language
(or languages) to tie the people
together. In former colonies, the offi cial language is often
one that ties them to their colonizer, as the colonizer's
language invariably is one already used by the educated
and politically powerful elite. A State adopts an offi cial
language in the hope of promoting communication and
interaction among peoples who speak different local and
regional languages.
Many former African colonies have adopted
English, French, or Portuguese as their offi cial language,
even though they have gained independence from for-
mer imperial powers. Thus, Portuguese is the offi cial
language of Angola, English is the offi cial language of
Nigeria and Ghana, and French is the offi cial language of
Côte d'Ivoire.
Such a policy is not without risks. As we noted earlier
in this chapter in the case of Nigeria, the long-term results
of using a foreign language may not be positive. In some
countries, including India, citizens objected to using a lan-
guage (English in India) that they associated with colonial
repression. Some former colonies chose not just one but
two offi cial languages: the European colonial language
plus one of the country's own major languages. English
and Hindi are offi cial languages of India. Similarly,
Multilingualism
In a world of some 200 political entities and several thou-
sand languages, most countries cope, to varying degrees,
with
multilingualis—
the use of more than one language by
sectors of the population. In the United States, the cur-
rent issue of Spanish as a second language is only the most
recent manifestation of a debate that is as old as the coun-
try itself. Canada is offi cially a bilingual state, but quite a
few Canadians speak a language other than English or
French at home.
To be sure, a few virtually
monolingual
states
—
countries where almost everyone speaks the same lan-
guage—do exist. These include Japan in Asia; Uruguay
in South America; Iceland, Denmark, Portugal, and
