Talk:Languages of Africa

message: Shouldn't this article be called African languages (plural)?
Strangeloop (talk) 22:33, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I concur. - Mustafaa 03:14, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

text: I've sorted it Theresa Knott  (taketh no rest) 10:35, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: I created a map and added it to the article. I will adjust the text soon; on the map, I divided Niger-Congo in A and B to show the size of the Bantoid branch.  - Strangeloop (talk) 12:17, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I really like the layout of the thematic map (appealing colours, smooth edges). But one thing that's missing is a correct colour shading for those areas where Indo-European language speakers form the majority (i.e. western South Africa, southern Namibia, plus all off-shore islands except Socotra, Djerba, Mayotte, the Comoros, Madagascar, Zanzibar and Pemba). Also, I believe the extent of Khoisan as shown is exaggerated slightly, or refers to the extent of that family several generations ago. Similarly, much of North Africa has gone through language shift and is now primarily Arabic-speaking, although this doesn't affect the colour on the map but perhaps the placement of the language name labels? --Big Adamsky 20:37, 17 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Big Adamsky, because I'm trying to centralize the discussion, I have copied these comments to :commons:Image talk:African language families.png and responded there. — mark ✎ 10:40, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I really like the African languages map, but I find the North African distribution questionable. Total absence of Arabic in the Northwest is misleading. Arabic is not only a second language of the majority, but also the first language of the absolute majority in Tunisia, a clear majority in Algeria and Morocco, and a significant pluraity in Mauritania. As it stands, the map seems to suggest that Arabic is spoken in Egypt and parts of Lybia, while Berber is spoken in the rest of North Africa (which is clearly not the reality). Berber is alive, true, but so is Arabic very clearly.--Karkaron 04:51, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

text:  I don't understand why the Nubian languages are colored as Afro-Asiatic.  They are Nilo-Saharan languages related to the languages of South Sudan, like Dinka and Nuer.Sukkoth 12:25, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Map & text 

message: I replaced the article with a major rewrite Mustafaa and I have been working on some time ago. There is still very much that remains to be done. I'll add a to do list here in a minute.  — mark ✎ 12:15, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  New version 

message: I'm trying to gather information about the situation of African languages itself on Wikimedia projects. For this I created a page on meta. I'm inviting you to indicate your knowledge about African languages itself, and possibly to help out with collecting some stats and adding links. Thanks, G-u-a-k-@ 12:26, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: African languages itself on Wikimedia project

message: So local Englishes should be the guide. I hope that's not controversial - it's the same as US/C'wealth spelling consensus. I've started a very unscientific survey of usage at User:JackyR/African language names - current usage. Please help. Particularly, pls give references for usage, so these can be used in the corresponding articles. Cheers, JackyR 16:44, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Please help with survey

message: Swahili is a creole of English, Arabic, and other languages.  As far as I know it isn't anyone's first languange.  While it spoken almost exclusively in Africa, it doesn't seem that much more "African" than Enlish, French, or Dutch.
*Ummm... see Swahili. Also, Afrikaans is most certainly an African language, and yet it is a mixture of Dutch, English, German and others. Mikker (...) 01:14, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is Swahili Really an African Language 

message: * It fails criteria 3. Not broad enough (talk about the history of the languages, the extinctions of them, the remoteness of some others, etc.) because so many aspects haven't been covered. Lincher 23:44, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Obviously. I'm removing the GAfailed template because the to do list at the top of the page was here all along, so anyone could see that this article still needed lots of work; besides, that list provides much more specific suggestions on how to improve the article. — mark ✎ 06:37, 22 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: GA failed

message: It was requested that this article be renamed but the procedure outlined at WP:RM#How to request a page move did not appear to be followed, and consensus could not be determined. Please request a move again with proper procedure if there is still a desire for the page to be moved. Thank you for your time! -- tariqabjotu 03:32, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Move Request 

message: This article was recently renamed from "African languages" to "Language of Africa". The brief discussion regarding the naming of this article (at the top of this page) supported the name "African languages", so I have renamed it accordingly. I do not see the rationale for taking this issue to Wikipedia:Requested moves (per the above suggestion) when it can be adequately discussed here.--Ezeu 18:56, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I support the move back. Let's leave it at African languages, it is simply the most descriptive and least confusing option. — mark ✎ 07:55, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article rename 

message: I enlivened links for these terms in #5 of Mark's to-do list. The national language article needs some significant revisions, and if anyone works on this issue for this article, maybe they might want to add some copy to that one too. Probably also with official language. There is another category of possible use to this subject for the African languages article, and that is regional language. --A12n 04:07, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  To-do #5  national languages vs. official languages 

message: I think that we should split an article of Languages of Africa. By Stooppy.
*I oppose the proposed split.  You want to segregate a separate article for "Languages of Africa - non-African languages" ???  I don't think that would be very helpful, and there isn't enough to say about any languages that could possibly meet that description, to warrant a dedicated page, anyway. ፈቃደ (ውይይት) 12:19, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  African languages and Non African languages 

message: In my opinion this article does not give a very good overview of African languages.  The text provides very little information except that there are four or five classes of language.  The maps are far more informative than the text, and yet insufficient.  I'd love to look at this article and be able to figure out:
# What are the most widely spoken languages (population estimates would be great), 
# Where are they are spoken (one of the maps almost does that, but not very clearly outlined)
# It probably needs to be split into official national languages, lingua franca, and first language statistics
# Some people are looking for information about languages in Africa today, while others want history and classifications of those languages, If you fail to separate them out enough it can be very confusing (see Lingua franca for an example of mixing the two)
# Some description of what is interesting or unique about some African languages (famously, the popping sounds and the tonal qualities that enables communication by drum, and some interesting use of prefixes.) User:KeithWright
These are interesting suggestions. Personally I've tried to add selected info from time to time, but am aware that the topic is huge and the article, while an excellent start, could use some more fundamental work. I took the liberty of changing your bullets to numbers in order to facilitate discussion of the various points. Here are some thoughts:
# I think that a table showing the top X number of African languages/"macrolanguages" in terms of speakership, with population, countries etc. might be good.
# This gets complicated. The table I suggest above might help. More detailed maps would get overwhelming, or simplify things to the point of introducing misinformation.
# I think this topic, "Languages of Africa," does include two broad themes: "African languages," or the languages indigenous to or unique to the continent (Arabic included, of course, as the mother tongue of millions); and "languages in Africa," which includes a lot of others, beginning with English, French, and Portuguese. The categories you suggest for statistics are neither easily clarifiable nor mutually exclusive. Some issues:
##"official national languages" as you put it is problematic. Many countries have two categories, official language and national language, with the latter being indigenous and fitting some other criteria that vary by country (BTW, the Wikipedia articles on those 2 subjects need thorough reworking to accommodate this sort of usage). Official languages include very often English, French, Portuguese, but also many African languages. A subsection on official languages could discuss why newly independent African states accepted the former colonial languages as official (de jure or de facto). This and brief discussion of national languages could in turn spawn a new article on language policy in Africa.
##"lingua franca" (or somtimes LWCs) is a good topic in terms of language use. It begins to look like one could tease out several overlapping and somewhat fuzzy frames: official languages, national languages, regional languages (seems to me that this is used in Democratic Republic of the Congo), lingua francas, cross-border languages, mother tongues...
##Statistics in a measured dose would be useful. IOW, how to choose some essential ones so as not to overwhelm readers. One problematic issue when you start to discuss language statistics in Africa (although not prominently discussed these days) is how many African languages there are. Yes, Ethnologue with very good research but also very "splitter" methodology, tells us over 2000, but many of those are highly interintelligible groups of tongues that other ("lumper") scholars might classify as dialects (see Lumpers and splitters). 
# This point leads me to think that this article could become more of a summary/introduction not only for existing articles on languages and language families etc., but also to a set of articles on issues like language policy (mentioned above), communication in African multilingual contexts, and others.
# There could be a section on interesting facts, and indeed there are some features of African languages in their diversity, that are of interest to linguists.  On the other hand, such an approach should not treat African languages as oddities. 
Hope this furthers the discussion. --A12n 12:21, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Personal Opinions about problems with this article 

message: Without falling into the trap of overt political correctness, I propose dumping the rather offensive split about 'colonial languages'. Firstly, a discussion of the role of these 'dirty' 'white' languages is important, and they should not be dismissed with a 'Besides...'. Secondly, there is some obvious hypocrisy in dismissing Afrikaans, a language which, though offensively white in some sense (though most of its speakers are not), at least developed in Africa, while including Arabic, the language of colonial slave traders, eunuch-makers and jihadists from the Arabian peninsula, a region which, if my atlas is younger than the current geological era, is still not in Africa. Afrikaans, it could be argued, developed at least partly like Swahili, with native Khoi, etc., developing the language in union with the Dutch settlers - the only difference being, it seems, that the Arab traders who catalysed the development of Swahili fail to fall in the most offensive group. After all, this most offensive group has a couple of million representatives in Africa, who almost count as human. Message: though it is perhaps inevitable to a degree, racial hypocrisy of a leftist kind seems to have infected the article. A more objective representation could be in order. I suggest that the list either incorporates all the 'colonial' languages fairly, or excludes Arabic as a non-indigenous language too, while including Afrikaans. That would at least be consistent. After all, English is also not just a superficial language in Africa - there are a couple of million first language speakers who have lived in Africa all of their lives, in South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Kenya... and similarly for other 'colonial' languages. They do exist.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.241.83.99 (talk) 16:14, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Colonial Languages? 

message: The only sober classification of African languages is that of Tucker and Bryan,
published in 1956 and 1966. They use about 50 classes, such as the Kru class in West Africa
and the Nilotic class in East Africa.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.44.108.96 (talk) 13:59, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sober 

message: Hi everyone, as you all may know Wikimeida is in the midst of its strategic planning process (see http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page for more information). As part of this process, I have been developing a fact base on Sub-Saharan African languages and their Wikipedias. The purpose of this fact base is to help the Wikimedia community understand the importance of these languages as they develop strategies to expand the reach of Wikimedia worldwide as well as to discuss the specific barriers to growth of these language projects. If any of you are also editors of any of the Sub-Saharan African language Wikipedias, I would really appreciate it if you took some time to look at what I've put together and make any changes or additions that you thought were appropriate. It would be especially great if anyone had some thoughts or ideas to add to the section on barriers to growth Sub-Saharan African language Wikipedias. I want to make sure that we have the most accurate information possible to inform the strategic plan as it is developed. This is the link http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reach/Regional_Analysis/Sub-Saharan_Africa Thanks!!!! Sarah476 (talk) 22:58, 23 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Input requested for Wikimedia strategic planning process 

message: The figures for the number of Amharic speakers is definitely out of date and too low. There are about 85 million people in Ethiopia today, at least 30% are native Amharic speakers, and at least another 30% (everyone with an education or living in towns and cities) speak Amharic as a second language.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rasmus Sonderriis (talk • contribs) 16:19, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  More Amharic speakers 

message: I returned to the old map. It's cartoonish, but at least it's obviously cartoonish. The new map is just wrong: Khartoum is uninhabited, the only languages in N Sudan are Nubian and Beja, etc. It some cases it's due to bad copy: the Egyptian population has been moved from the Nile to the open desert. But in other cases the original map is worse: Madagascar is largely uninhabited, for example, but the western Sahara is inhabited. Best IMO to stick to the old map until we can create something decent. — kwami (talk) 02:28, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Map 

message: In my understanding, the major non-Bantu language phylum in Southern Africa is commonly referred to as Khoisan, whereas this article uses Khoe. The broader Khoisan family is sometimes called Khoesan, but even in this instance, the link should be to the phylum rather than the Khoe sub-brach. 94.174.122.25 (talk) 16:49, 15 January 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: The Khoe languages article seems to answer your questions. Greenman (talk) 17:38, 15 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Language families 

message: There are several types of problems with naming "six traditional language families represented in Africa":
#Khoi-San, not necessarily "a family" at all, more like a large bin for "other languages"
#Bantu vs. Niger Congo A: these "two families" are actually one branch and one "other" category within a single family
#Nilo-Saharan may or may not be a single family, but it would certainly make more sense to break this down than to break down Niger-Congo into "Bantu vs. non-Bantu"
#Afro-Asiatic, this is actually a family, but it is not "represented in Africa" alone, viz., Semitic is intrusive to Africa (a) about 1000 BC (South Semitic) and again around 700 AD (Arabic). These are not "African languages" in the narrow sense
#Malagasy is intrusive to Madagascar (and not even to Africa proper), say, in the early centuries AD, and is really a Southeast Asian language
#If Semitic and Malagasy are "African languages" simply by virtue of being spoken there today, then, so is Indo-European (Afrikaans), intrusive from Europe. Treating Afrikaans as somehow "more intrusive" than Arabic would be a rather dodgy example of "Eurocentrism" (it cannot be African because it came from Europe? But Arabic can, because it came from Asia?)
--dab (𒁳) 14:12, 21 September 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Well that's the thing, the Semitic homeland itself is debated between the Ethiopian region and Western Asia. If it's captioned that Semitic as a whole is intrusive to Africa from Asia (rather than having evolved in situ), that's essentially equivalent to stating that the Semitic phylum itself originated in Asia. Singling out Semitic as intrusive likewise suggests that none of the other branches of Afro-Asiatic could also have been introduced to Africa from Asia. This, by consequence, rules out the Asian origin hypothesis for Proto-Afro-Asiatic. To remove any doubt as to what is meant, the caption should perhaps therefore simply indicate that Arabic is intrusive to Africa. This is also consistent with the map itself, which shows Arabic. Middayexpress (talk) 14:43, 25 September 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Also, juxtaposing Niger-Congo's Bantu subgroup beside the major families seems to at a glance give the impression that it is a major family of its own. Linking instead again to Niger-Congo (as done in the map), and parenthetically noting that Bantu is Niger-Congo's "largest branch" or something to that effect (i.e. explaining the ostensible reason as to why Bantu has been highlighted in the map as "Niger Congo B") should resolve this ambiguity. Middayexpress (talk) 14:43, 25 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: "six traditional families"

message: The 'afro-asiatic language group' is a topic of debate among different schools of linguistics.
I thought Wikipedia was only to publish established facts and not topics that are still under academic/scholarly debate?
Help me understand. I raise this concern because the african language map appears to be inaccurate under strict scientific scrutiny.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.104.35.83 (talk) 21:15, 20 May 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, the Afro-Asiatic family is quite well-established (c.f. ). It's Khoisan that's uncertain. Middayexpress (talk) 14:41, 21 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Afro-asiatic language is at best a hypothesis  

message: In the section on Number of Speakers, I earlier added the language Shilha, gave the number of speakers as 14.000.000 as according to ethnologue and listed it as an official language in Morocco, per their constitution which has Berber as one of their official languages. Now the problem is that someone else has added Berber to the list, and changed Shilha to not being official anywhere. This is problematic because Berber is arguably group of languages, and not one single language. Shilha is perhaps the largest berber language in Morocco (though not close to 14.000.000 in that country), but their official languages do not include a specific Berber language. Not sure what to do. I would like to show that Berber languages have official status in Morocco, but I'm hesitant to add a language to the list that does not have a calculated number of speakers etc. For now, I'll start by removing the newly added languages with less than a million native speakers, but I need advice on the Berber-thing. --TheEsb (talk) 22:37, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  The inclusion of Berber languages 

message: Hi,
I am updating this deadlink:
25 ^  https://web.archive.org/web/20120502204211/http://www.bbportuguese.com/the-future-of-portuguese.html
Our previous website BBPortuguese.com was merged into TheTranslationCompany.com, so I have replaced the web.archive.org page address used in the reference area of "Languages of Africa" with our new page with the very same content:
https://thetranslationcompany.com/resources/language-country/portuguese-language/portuguese-language/future-portuguese.htm
Please let me know if you have any suggestions or concerns regarding this edit.
Sincerely,
Luciano Oliveira
BBPortuguese & TTC Founder
Luciano.nyc (talk) 22:57, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you! I only wonder, since yours is the only source I can find online: from where do you have the number 13.7 million Portuguese speakers in Africa? Sincerely TheEsb (talk) 23:18, 10 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Updated dead link - Same content, New URL 

message: As sign languages are proven time and time again and are without a doubt natural human languages, their inclusion in this article is paramount. Classing them in a subsection without visibility is demoting these languages, of which there are hundreds found across the continent. The opening of the article as well as the map on the right should include information on the major sign language families (Francosign, Paget Gorman Sign System, Arab Sign, &c.; "does not include sign languages"). As well, to you Soupforone sign languages as with other languages including oral and tactile are equally spoken. Without including them up front and in the intro, it is painting a false picture of the linguistic scene across Africa; in short, it is misleading to not include sign languages in equal and proper ways. --Danachos (talk) 19:04, 15 October 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: The article presently says that there are plural sign languages in Tanzania. then the next paragraph speaks of a single "Tanzanian Sign Language". I hope somebody with actual knowledge can correct this for us, please. Pete unseth (talk) 20:36, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sign Languages 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Isn't it over 100 million?--occono (talk) 04:44, 30 July 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  700k French speakers? 

message: So, Africa has about 1.216 BILLION citizens. If you add up the totals on the section "Number of speakers", it totals out to roughly maybe 300 or 400 million as a ballpark figure. What do the other billion inhabitants of Africa speak? Five thousand other languages? Mostly 100 languages and dialects? This table seems misleading and/or significantly incomplete. Any ideas how to best deal with this? Leave it as is? Move it to user space or talk space? I hope this is a constructive critique. Thanks for reading this. Michael Ten (talk) 06:01, 28 October 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Flawed section "Number of speakers"?  

message: The purpose of this was not to subordinate the languages of Africa to Africa's colonial past. 
Quite the reverse: the purpose is to remind people arriving at those other articles and viewing Africa through one of those small lens that there's a larger lens available (this article here)—one which considers Africa as a whole, and not as someone else's patchwork quilt. 
Very few of these articles link to Languages of Africa in their lead sections, so the normal pathway to broadening does not function in this particular context. 
I'm not wedded to this. If the consensus find this more annoying that useful, you'll get no complaints from me over reversion. 
But I honestly do think Africa should take pride in the big picture, and not worry about which side of these mutual references gains the upper hand, and trust that the colonial legacy of seeing this through the default lens of colonial history will someday fade (sooner rather than later, in so far as Wikipedia illuminates the path). — MaxEnt 13:02, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  New section under See Also: Colonial and migratory influences 

message: There no info regarding Mali langugaes on this article Omda4wady (talk) 11:03, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  What about Mali ???