NATLANG: English Homework - Keeping alive languages of minoriti...
| From: | Doug Dee <amateurlinguist@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, March 6, 2005, 16:37 |
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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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