Re: NATLANG: English Homework - Keeping alive languages of minoriti...

whoops!  I blame it on my recent closed head injury.  I don't know for a
fact, but I suspect that you are right.  I think that in a area large
enough to host several indigenous languages there must be some way for
then nation as a whole to communicate, and it seems natural that one of
the native languages  would come into use.  But as Mr. Mills suggested,
it seems to be that the language that comes into use is the language of
the politically (and militarily?) dominant group.  In Mozambique, I
suppose that because they had been ruled by the Portuguese and most of
the population had learned it out of necessity, it stood ready made to
step in and become the lingua franca. "Everyone" spoke Portuguese, few
speakers of Mozambique's native languages spoke any of the other native
languages.  Of course, this is all my own amatuer speculation.
G
 Doug Dee wrote:

>In a message dated 3/6/2005 11:29:24 AM Eastern Standard Time,
>kingbiscuitglk@COMCAST.NET writes:
>
>
>
>>I saw an article yesterday (I'll dig it up) discussing the decline of
>>indigenous languages, for example in Madagascar there are 23 such
>>langauges but they are declining rapidly since Portuguese became the
>>official language upon thier independence in '75.
>>
>>
>
>Just because I enjoy nit-picking:  You wrote "Madagascar" but the article you
>then posted is about Mozambique.
>
>I don't know much about Mozambique, but in most of Africa, dying languages
>are threatened not by the ex-Colonial languages (which are generally spoken only
>by a small elite, who use them as second languages) but by more widely spoken
>African languages.
>
>Doug
>
>
>
>

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