|
|
| Home »» Learning Options »» Languages »» Gift Of Tongues |
| Gift of Tongues |
Would you like to go on a safari deep in Africa´s belly and be able to understand your guide when he speaks his native tongue? Or how about understanding those exotic adventure movies set in Africa´s wonderful deserts and tropics? Or you may even want to understand the product descriptions in those wonderful African shops that have been opening in Dublin! Well, you can, although not very easily in Ireland unfortunately. Although, we´re becoming a more and more multi-cultured society, there are people from every corner of the African continent living in Ireland and they may be eager to help you learn. Africa´s abundant natural wealth has always attracted mineral explorers and nature tourists, so it´s quite an advantage to know something of the native tongues and cultures if you fit into either category.
Africa is a vast land of many tribes, many languages and many dialects. Swahili is probably the best know of the tongues. It´s spoken as a first language along the coast of East Africa from Mogadishu to Mozambique, and on the off-shore islands, and is the national language of Tanzania and an official language in Kenya. It is spoken as a lingua franca throughout Tanzania, widely in Kenya, and in parts of Uganda, Zaire, Sudan, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. There are perhaps 2 million mother-tongue speakers and 10-20 million second-language speakers.
Swahili is a Bantu language, considerably influenced by Arabic and more recently by English. It was first written in Arabic characters and more recently in Roman. Poetry is highly esteemed by the Swahili, and many newspapers carry poetry contributed by readers, where Irish papers print readers' letters.
Zulu is another well known African tongue, perhaps famed through those ever-hardy warriors in South Africa, the Zulus. It´s one of the nine Bantu languages spoken in South Africa. These languages are shared by a population of 30 million, Zulu having the largest number of mother tongue speakers, estimated to be more than 6 million.
Zulu is closely related to Ndebele (South Africa and Zimbabwe), Swati (spoken in Swaziland and adjacent areas in South Africa) Xhosa, and other languages of Southern Africa. Zulu is spoken mainly in KwaZulu-Natal, but it is also the lingua franca of the Southern Transvaal, one of the most densely populated industrial areas in South Africa.
Hausa is one of the principal languages of Nigeria, and it is important also in Niger, Ghana and Cameroon. An estimated 50 million people speak Hausa, more than any other African language and more than many European languages. It´s also spoken as a minority language in towns and cities from Kaolack in Senegal to Khartoum in the Sudan.
Hausa has a long tradition of song and poetry within a cosmopolitan Islamic culture that arose largely from the position of the old Hausa states astride the trans-Saharan and savanna trade routes. As a lingua franca in areas of West Africa the language has grown and adapted to different social environments.
Broadcasting in Hausa from the BBC, Voice of America, Radio Moscow and Deutsche Welle, as well as from local Nigerian radio and TV stations, has meant that the language has been adapting to the modern communicative needs of current affairs, science and business. It also means it´s one of the most accessible and thus more easily learned of the African tongues.
Somali is spoken throughout the eastern part of the Horn of Africa in Somalia, the self-declared Republic of Somaliland, as well as in neighbouring areas of Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya. There are also many Somali communities in other parts of Africa, the Middle East and America as well as in Europe and the UK where cities such as London, Cardiff and now Dublin have substantial Somali communities.
Somalis are keen poets and musicians. Their craft has been appreciated by musicologists around the world for years. Somali poetry differs in subject matter and stylistic characteristics with musical accompaniment at the heart of certain types of poetry, while theatre has become an important art form incorporating poetry. Somali arts have many fans worldwide, making an understanding of the language more important in cultural sectors.
Amharic is the national language of Ethiopia and is spoken by around 12 million people as their mother-tongue and by many more as a second language. Though only one of seventy or so languages spoken in Ethiopia, Amharic has been the language of royalty and the dominant population group in Highland Ethiopia since at least the late 13th century. It remains the official language of Ethiopia today.
Interestingly, Amharic belongs to the Semitic family of languages and as such is related to Arabic and Hebrew. However, whilst many of the grammatical forms are reminiscent of the latter languages, the sentence structure (syntax) of Amharic is very different and has more in common with the non-Semitic languages of Ethiopia.
Amharic is written in its own script, a syllabary, derived from the alphabet of ancient South Arabia. Whilst the earliest traces of written Amharic go back to the 14th century, it was not until the middle of the 19th century that Amharic came to be the regular written medium in Ethiopia. It supplanted Classical Ethiopic (Ge'ez), but this remains the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the medium of traditional Ethiopian learning and scholarship. This century there´s been a flowering of Amharic literature to allow it become one of the most prolific vernacular literatures in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Unfortunately, apart from some resources in the larger libraries, Ireland is not a suitable place to seriously indulge your interests in African languages. The best place in Europe to learn African languages is not very far away for prospective Irish students however. It´s the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. The African Languages and Culture Department at the school houses the largest concentration of scholars devoted to the study of African languages and culture in Europe, and the collective expertise in the college includes postgraduate research that leads its field. Six languages are regularly taught here on an undergraduate level, - Amharic, Hausa, KiSwahili, Somali, Yoruba and Zulu. There is also much expertise in the languages of the Horn of Africa, Kenya/Tanzania, Nigeria and South Africa. There's also heavy emphasis given to African literature: poetry, song, dance, drama and instrumental music.
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
Hot Links |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
POLL |
|
| |
|
