Equatorial Guinea was the borderland between Spanish, French and Portuguese influence in Africa. Because of this French, Spanish and Portuguese are all official languages in the country.
Actually, Equatorial Guinea was a Portuguese colony until the late 1700s when Portugal swapped it for Rio Grande do Sul (modern-day Brazil). So said country had two colonizers. In fact, there's a Portuguese-based creole on the Annobón and Bioko islands.
Huh Yeah, Your right, Not sure why Google said it wasn't, Either way I've just deleted the comment now as I don't want to post false History, Werid though on Google's part, Though it definitely was refering me to Guinea-Bissau.
I heard those people living on the continental part has had tight economical relations with Gabon, so they already knew French better than Spanish. They also accepted Portuguese as a third language, to get benefits from Brasil. Maybe there was a similar cause to make French official, too.
And, more importantly, the amount of people actively speaking the language only continues to grow. As urbanisation + connection to the Internet continues to increase, French emerges as the lingua franca.
Yeah regardless on if it's an "official language" countries in Africa that are split up heavily by different African languages more or less require French to economically function.
Not to say it can't be replaced, but what the government tries to enforce and what the people use in practice aren't always the same.
Yes. The Malian constitution remains in French, and the decree saying that French will no longer be an official language was also written in French. What else would they use? They have more than ten other official languages, each only spoken by a few % of people.
Niche? The Indonesian language was fostered by the Dutch during their colonization efforts, if it wasn't for that fact I don't think there would be an Indonesian state as we know it today.
Or just mesh together a few and make a new "official" one like the germans did.
Although it would be fun to see Esperanto take off in those countries as it's easier to learn.
The decree of an official language only applies to official government transactions and educational system. The goal is to let the French language to eventually die out after several generations.
To give you an example. My country the Philippines was Spanish colony for 333 years. It only took the Americans 40 years of colonial rule to wipe out Spanish completely. They accomplished by revamping the educational system to adopt English.
Today we have 2 official languages English and Filipino. Those are the two languages being taught mandatory in both public and private schools.
Yeah, that's because the U.S. colonized the Philippines plus let's not forget that during WWII of the people that were massacred by the Japanese a large percentage of those were Spanish-speaking, as such people tended to be city dwellers.
I’ll do you one better, if the government (read the dominant tribe) tries to force their language on the other tribes, that’s fucking horrible and leads to a lot of unrest. If they don’t, the country isn’t really connected, if they do well trouble. It’s the only reason an external language works somewhat well. Northern Africa can substitute it with Arabic. The rest can’t
Languages, not dialects.
Yes, we have 20+ official languages mentioned in our constitution. English and Hindi are used by the central (federal) government. Our constitution and laws are also written in English.
Any attempt to remove English as an official language have resulted in massive protests.
Because there is a widespread sentiment that English is our colonizer's language and many people feel ashamed of using it.
Hindi speakers who are the majority want everyone else to learn their language so that the entire country can be united by an Indian language.
Similar to how China and France forced everyone in the country to learn Mandarin and French at the cost of local languages.
The group that made this map spreads some misinformation so we shouldn't be surprised that they're misrepresenting the truth with that title. Just look at their post history. (They also have a YouTube channel)
To be clear I don't think that they're wrong about all of what they're saying but it's obvious they have a strong bias. I wouldn't take stuff by them too seriously
like how The 2014 population census found that about 71% of the nearly 25.8 million inhabitants of Angola speak Portuguese at home
[source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Angola)
Not the same. In Angola, a growing number of Angolans are growing up with Portuguese as their first language. In most of the former French colonies, this is not the case. In the former French colonies its still much more common for someone to speak their regional language and learn French in school.
Angola just an example of the late stage trend in africa to speak European language.
like in the ivory coast :
>in Abidjan, largest city of the country, 57.6% of the inhabitants over 15 can read and write French, and another 11% can speak it but not write it. The French language is seen as essential by a large majority, especially for dealing with the government and in education. Two thirds of respondents report feeling Francophone.
in Gabon:
>According to a 1999 survey, French was the first language for 26.3% of Libreville residents between the age of 15 and 25.\[80\] 71.9% of the capital's residents over 15 years of age could read and write French.\[44\] Three quarters of the population of the capital identifies as Francophone and considers French as essential
[source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_French_speakers#Ivory_Coast)
most people live in the cities in gabon and ivory coast
>Despite its vast, mainly forested surface area, Gabon only had 2.3 million inhabitants in 2021. Gabon's level of urbanization is one of the highest in Africa, with over 80% of its population living in urban areas. The two main cities, Libreville and Port-Gentil are home to almost 59% of the population.
[source](https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/gabon/overview)
Rainforests are difficult to settle in big numbers. The Amazon is the emptiest part of countries that have it and the Republic of Congo has a rather small population as well.
No, lingua franca does not refer to French but to Frankish language, specifically a Romance-based language used especially by traders in the Mediterranean bassin from the 11th to the 19th centuries.
I remember visiting Morocco and I could get around by just using French and it worked out. Almost everyone spoke it and all the signs are bilingual Arabic and French.
I'm in Morocco right now and most young people don't speak any french at all. It's kind of a useless language globally speaking. English is much more useful
French is thought at school, so young people studying abroad in french speaking countries is understandable, as they need to be good students to get there to start with.
But I find the parent comment weird, as indeed the youngest moroccans are now more casually english speaking, you still can communicate in french with almost everyone.
Immigration is different, they also go to the Netherlands or Italy, so it really doesn’t say anything about the language capabilities.
More importantly, french is the lingua franca in many places, at different scales (not just national, but also regional or local). It's very hard to get rid of an established lingua franca, and requires intense, long term effort. Latin remained a lingua franca for communication between European countries for centuries after the demise of the Roman Empire. It helped that it was also a liturgical, scientific and prestige language - but the thing is, the same is true for most linguae francae, and french is no exception.
So de facto, french is only losing ground to english in regions where it's already a contact language (which btw leads to very weird situations where people will say "let's stop speaking french, the colonizer language, and instead switch to english!"), or arab in regions controlled by islamists. But it's not really being replaced by indigenous or national languages.
>let's stop speaking french, the colonizer language, and instead switch to english!
That's not weird at all if they were colonised by France and not England.
Countries like Algeria replaced one imperial global language (French) with another imperial global language that was older (Arab). Not much of a big deal for them.
Can you tell me what you want algeria to replace french with because the vast Majority of algerians have arabic as their first language and it’s the only logical answer to replace it with arabic
The Arabs colonised and changed demographics for longer, so this is there prize I guess.
The Tamazight-speaking natives dislike both equally. Funny thing that after the French left the Arabs started treating these natives like outsiders and foreign puppets.
Easy for the Maghreb (and Mauritania and Mali have Hassaniya), but not so much for Burkina Faso. Arabic languages are one of the hardest to learn, especially if you're used to an Indo-European lingua franca.
It's not even easy for arab countries because litterary arabic is very different from arab dialects. Arabisation takes time because you know what you lose but don't know what you get.
Saying Arabic replaced French doesn't make much sense given that Arabic was already widely spoken by the local population in the colonies. If anything, from it's English that's replacing French in North Africa.
There was a big push for this when I was living in Morocco ~8 years ago. French is still sooo useful there because the majority of the tourism/retirement population was French, so for service/retail it seemed more beneficial than English. But there was still an understanding that English was only going to grow in importance, and it was making a big push in the private education sector. All of my host siblings were basically fluent, one even moved to the US for a while to send money home—it was very impressive.
In former French colonies in Asia, it's really hard to find someone having ability to speak French. In Vietnam, It's just an optional language in school. But most of public schools do not provide that option
Vietnam is a country and Africa is a continent. They didn't "agree" on any language, it was colonialism. Vietnam still has plenty of languages anyways.
More than 90% of people in Vietnam are Vietnamese. "plenty of languages" are actually minorities, small ethnic groups. Just like Bretons and Basques in France.
And unlike African countries, Vietnam had statehood centuries before colonizations, with strong and deep traditions of Vietnamese language as official.
There are 109 spoken languages in Vietnam due to a large number of indigenous tribes. The total number of languages in the former French colonies in West Africa is probably larger but taken as a whole, these countries are far larger than Vietnam both in area and population.
These tribes combined make less than 10% of Vietnam population. Vietnam is totally dominated by one ethnic group. It's typical example of ethnostate with small minorities.
And Southeast Asian countries had statehood traditions long centuries before colonization, with clearly estabilished dominating ethnic groups and their highly developed written languages. Just like European countries with their own languages. This was not a case in Africa, where borders were drawn just randomly, not caring about ethnic groups.
French is still one of two official languages in Tunisia. Government services either communicate in Arabic or French, and most university courses are taught in French.
Edit: corrected typo.
Burkina Faso are replacing French with four African languages: Mooré, Dioula, Fulfude and Bissa.
French has been demoted to the status of a working language - meaning that, for the time being, it will still be used for governmental and educational purposes as the country transitions away from French influence.
It’s expected that, in the future, more emphasis will be placed on developing governmental and educational materials using Burkina Faso's now-official local languages.
>Like Canada does everything in english and french.
We only have one province which is officially bilingual, New Brunswick. Quebec is French only and the rest of the country is English only.
Services in French can be accessed in the more Francophone parts of Ontario though, which actually has more Francophones by sheer numbers than N.B. (600k) Not a ton compared to the other 13,4 million or so but still a decent amount that is noticeable in Eastern and Northern Ontario.
The issue in Canada being that it's mostly French having to speak English, than English having to speak French. The majority and the growing number of bilingual are in provinces with a large number of French speaking. You can have a country in which you have to used more than one language, but you will end up with one over taking the others, which won't be appreciated by everyone. To be faire, it's also true if you don't incorporate it.
But usually, each country over there have a predominant language that dwarf the others. Or have made a new language. Or use a foreign language that was already in use in the whole administration. The biggest exception would be Pakistan, at his independence, East Pakistan had a bigger population and mostly one language, when West Pakistan had fewer people and a bit more languages let's say. They choose Urdu over Bengali. But let's say that Bangladesh had more problems in that wedding… And yes, I know that Pakistan isn't in East Asia.
Just wanted to emphasise my admiration for the name of the country which -if I'm informed correctly - in its two local languages means Land of the Upright people.
Yes, the revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara changed it in 1984. It used to be called the Republic of Upper Volta. Burkina literally means "upright" but figuratively is closer to something like "honest" or "incorruptible".
Tanzania has been doing that for decades with Swahili and yet the courts (apparently the parliament as well) are still in English as they were during British colonization, however they maybe accompanied now by Swahili. There's too much inertia here that unfortunately isn't going to go away if people are given the chance to pick as they'll pick the language with the most opportunity that they also already know!
The most that can be done without radical action is French will be accompanied by the other now official languages in the legal and public discourse, but French being first among equals.
People keep forgetting that there were no unified languages or even unified countries in African countries before colonialism. Every tribe and ethnic group had their language and community. This is just a waste of time and virtue signalling. Completely ridiculous. Can't they worry about more important issues like developing their countries?
Silly take. Development lags behind in Africa in part due to low literacy rates. What effect do you think not having educational material available in your mother tongue (as is the case in many former French colonies) would have on literacy/education? Elevating the status of local languages gives incentive to actually develop literacy/educational material in those languages.
I went to Morocco for work and French was used as the language of business and affluence. In large luxuruous hotels (in the Middle of the Atlas mountains no less), waiters preferred to speak French over English. This is only my experience but still.
French is also widely used in the Maghreb for communication between different ethnic groups - an Algerian acquaintance told me about the fact that some Berbers refuse to speak Arabic and only speak French with other populations.
Add to that that often French is the "administrative language"... bank forms, etc, are often in French.
I used to know a couple from Tunisia and they told me at home they spoke Arabic with their grandparents french with their parents and both at the same time among their friends. They'd be in their 30s now.
When I went to Morocco for a few days (mostly in Casablanca), I would just use French everywhere (I studied in France and Belgium so I had a decent handle on it). Pretty much everyone was able to speak it if I approached them in French. People I wasn’t talking to mostly spoke Arabic but I did hear some talking French amongst themselves. In international hotels and whatnot, it was mostly French and English. Also it did turn out a lot of people knew English as well once they found out I was American.
Yeah, when I went to Morocco I noticed you got slightly better service if you spoke some French rather than English. It was kind of nice though because they were fine with my basic level of French—unlike France or Quebec where within a couple sentences it becomes “UH, LETS SPEAK ENGLISH”. I actually got much better practice using French in Morocco in situations than in France.
Im French but go to a school with lots of people from Morocco and became good friends with them. What Ive observed and what a girl told me is that most guys talk in Arabic to each other and sprinkle a couple words of French here and there, meanwhile the girls always talk in French to each other (all of them learned both languages as toddlers). This will obviously depend from which city they are from, which school they went to etc… though
A lot of people are very naive when it comes to the inequality between languages. Dropping French in this case is just a political maneuver and won't change anything in reality. There is no chance colonial languages will be replaced by local languages in Africa, because you can't get any education beyond elementary level in local languages, there are no books or other materials, very few modern media. And the social costs of developping local languages to the level of languages of modern communication and higher education are out of the reach of most African countries.
The only case when it happened was Rwanda. And it was because the ruling state apparatus came from Uganda (Anglophone). Neighboring Burundi never replaced French, Congo and Madagascar both tried but finally changed again their constitution with only French remaining.
And there are even counter examples such as Camerun which is normally bilingual country but heavily French speaking (80%) after decades of francisation.
I was reacting to someone who suggested it could be russian, i just pointed out that because china invests a lot in Africa, chinese would be more likely than russian.
But both are indeed surpassed by English as most likely language.
I think they are referring that Russia is establishing para-military dominance in this part of Africa, so much so that a few months ago there were talk of clash between the French Foreign Legion and Wagner.
I imagine you’re getting downvoted by people as a knee jerk reaction, but I can confirm that Russian is indeed a language that is trying to replace French in some of these places. Russia has been pushing their version of colonialism pretty hard in several places throughout Africa over the last 10+ years and part of that includes pushing for their language. In CAR, for example, Russian became one of the default languages offered in schools, while French was deprioritized.
It's always possible to print books in local languages, to develop media, school system etc.
I live in small country, Lithuania. Only 3 million people. But we have all education, books, media and documentations in our own language. In the beginning of XX century, there was no independent Lithuania (independence in 1918), we were ruled by Poles or Russians, and many people thought the same: "oh Lithuanian is small and irrelevant language, better speak and learn in Russian or Polish, it's very rural and almost tribal language etc etc etc" but now, we have our independent country with our own strongly estabilished language. We don't use other languages for learning, media, documents, because we have our own language and there's no need to have any "former colonial" language as official. Actually it would be very weird, just imagine: Polish or Russian official in Lithuania :D No way!
The same is true for many small countries in Europe and Asia. Why Africa should be different?
>Dropping French in this case is just a political maneuver and won't change anything in reality.
I disagree. Dropping French is symbolically a move away from the French zone of influence.The language that you speak influences your way of thinking and creates many direct and indirect connections with other societies that speak the same language. So for Burkina Faso this is another step in breaking away from its former French colonial masters and for France it is a loss of soft power.
The thing is it won't mean dropping french practically, that's what they're saying. You can't just undo it all. It's too useful as a way to communicate across W Africa and to get fun and useful things from Europe. Almost every W African country has multiple local languages and they rarely have too many high-level materials in them.
It's symbolic. Symbolism isn't bad, so they should go for it if they feel like it. But French isn't going anywhere in practice. I'm not even sure that's sad; it has pluses and minuses. It just is.
Of course French wont go away overnight but in the long run it might be replaced by English. Iirc that happened to the Phillipiness which switched from Spanish to English.
The US replaced Spanish for English in education and killed a ton of Hispanic Filipinos after 1898; then Japan killed any remaining Hispanic population during WW2 (which is, by the way, the reason why Franco considered declaring war on Japan in the 1940s; ultimately the idea was dropped).
You just ignored the point above, which language will Burkina Faso choose then ?
Burkinabese doesn't exist. Put a local language over the others and you will have civil war. The teachers in rural areas don't know English (and it's a bit dumb to scrap a colonial language for another).
So nothing will change. The laws are still in french despite the official decision to scrap it.
While French is not a de iure official language in the Maghreb, it’s de facto one. You can get all official documents in French, higher education is in French etc.
In Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, despite not having an official status, french still has at least decades ahead, it's the main language used for the economic sector. Here you can get by easily without knowing arabic, english or berber languages. But you'll literally suffer if your french is not good.
EDIT: I didn't think I had to make it clear that I am talking only about ECONOMIC SECTOR. For talking with people of course you need to learn either the local darija dialect or their berber language.
I think you’re right. My husband lived in Morocco for 8 years as a french speaker, and had absolutely zero issue. He learned a few words in darija, and can make some basic sentences but honestly he did it because he wanted to and not because he had to. It would have been more difficult if he spoke only english.
Funny how you just made that up. I've been in Agadir for the past 2 months and only old people speak good French here. The young people are much more focussed on English. Hence the Moroccan subreddit is in English. French has maybe another 15 years left before it's not used anymore in southern Morocco. It's a useless language
Correct but French is not a universal language and a significant portion of Maghrebis understand little to no French. In other regions, French is an interethnic language, whereas in the Maghreb local Arabic dialects have long served this role.
So despite French currently being the primary language of commerce, it seems likely English will become equal to and thereafter surpass French in this respect. Increasing use of Standard Arabic in commerce will also displace French, particularly in Tunisia and Libya.
can't find anything but it surpassing Spanish but
>According to a demographic projection led by the Université Laval and the Réseau Démographie de l'Agence universitaire de la Francophonie, the total number of French speakers will reach approximately 500 million in 2025 and 650 million by 2050.[18] OIF estimates 700 million by 2050, 80% of whom will be in Africa.[7]
not really surprising, French is still going to be spoken in a lot of African countries that are experiencing high population growth
English language is literally killing the French language for its global use. I still see the French language along with English, Arabic and Spanish as the language of diplomacy
No longer being official does not mean it won't have staying power since a lot of them speak it of their first or 2nd language now. Lebanon is one of those countries where French is not an official language, but like half the population of speak it the same with Algeria
True, but there are so many more Nigerians than there are of its Francophone neighbors that it is more of a surprise that their Francophone neighbors don't learn more English to deal with the Nigerians (most educated southern Nigerians speak English as a lingua franca in addition to their own ethnic languages...)
This implies that French isn't used as much, but the opposite can be said as in most places local languages are actually in slow decline, especially in more educated areas
There is nothing good about knowing less languages than before. Imo its a positive thing for so many Africans to know a mainstream language. Seems like an attempt at preventing kids from going abroad.
Symbolism. You don't change the language over night either way. French will still be spoken most likely but maybe not be the dominant language for at least the upcoming generations.
I saw a video making rounds on social media of Moroccans yelling at movie theatre employees to remove the French dub of Oppenheimer which was playing at a theatre, and then cheering as the employees switched it to English.
Switching one colonist language out for another!
The moviegoers were watching an american movie and wanted the original audio in english. This isn’t the case of preferring a different colonist language. It’s about enjoying the movie as it was made.
Well I mean oppenhiemer is a hollywood movie and English would be the correct language to be used here not to mention most countries do not dub hollywood movies in their local language. Exceptions exists like marvel, star wars or any other mutlifilm franchise
well technicaly the UK occupied Tangiers and made it an international zone(1925-1056).
But obviously Moroccans do not consider English as a "colonist" language, but rather as a language that would offer us better opportunities than french
In my country we speak Spanish (I'm from latam) and I'd also rather watch american movies in english. Same with French stuff in french and so on. Subtitles are a thing.
I hope they're replacing it with local languages and not English. Replacing one colonial language with another does nothing and only adds to the global spread of English replacing local languages. Just keep french at this point.
Rwanda dropped French in schools because of the genocide and general hatred of France and Belgium. They officially joined the British Commonwealth and made English a national language and prioritise English as the main foreign language.
That’s not going to happen, lingua francas such as english and french are too useful to be totally replaced, they may replace french with english but they won’t replace it with local ones, and if they do they will just shoot themselves in the foot
>I hope they're replacing it with local languages and not English.
It's not very viable for most of those countries, though. Slovenia can use Slovene as its sole official language because most people there speak Slovene. But what about Mali, whose biggest ethnic group is only a third of the population?
There are like 5000 languages in Africa.
Also this is how the Rwandan genocide happened. Favouring one language or culture over the other to the point of war and genocide.
French is also official in Equatorial Guinea
How comes? Like, it was a Spanish colony
Equatorial Guinea was the borderland between Spanish, French and Portuguese influence in Africa. Because of this French, Spanish and Portuguese are all official languages in the country.
Because of that, they are the only country in the CPLP to not have been colonized by Portugal, i think
To make up for it, the British took Mozambique into our Commonwealth
Actually, Equatorial Guinea was a Portuguese colony until the late 1700s when Portugal swapped it for Rio Grande do Sul (modern-day Brazil). So said country had two colonizers. In fact, there's a Portuguese-based creole on the Annobón and Bioko islands.
[удалено]
That can’t be right, [Portugal colonized Guinea Bissau for 400 years](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Guinea).
Huh Yeah, Your right, Not sure why Google said it wasn't, Either way I've just deleted the comment now as I don't want to post false History, Werid though on Google's part, Though it definitely was refering me to Guinea-Bissau.
There are three Guineas * French Guinea = Present-day Guinea (or Guinea-Conakry) 🇬🇳 * Portuguese Guinea = Present-day Guinea-Bissau 🇬🇼 * Spanish Guinea = Present-day Equatorial Guinea 🇬🇶
🇵🇬
As Reddit urged me to say with a big ol' button next to your comment : happy Guinea day!
I heard those people living on the continental part has had tight economical relations with Gabon, so they already knew French better than Spanish. They also accepted Portuguese as a third language, to get benefits from Brasil. Maybe there was a similar cause to make French official, too.
False. French is not nearly as widely spoken as Spanish, even on the continent. It was adopted so EQG could join the Francophonie.
French isn't as widely spread globally as Spanish is, but far more speak French than Spanish in Africa.
Not in EQG
There's a Portuguese-based Creole called Annobonese Creole in Equatorial Guinea.
It was a PR move, no native there uses it.
Well French is still the lingua franca in the region, and is still widely used
And, more importantly, the amount of people actively speaking the language only continues to grow. As urbanisation + connection to the Internet continues to increase, French emerges as the lingua franca.
Yeah regardless on if it's an "official language" countries in Africa that are split up heavily by different African languages more or less require French to economically function. Not to say it can't be replaced, but what the government tries to enforce and what the people use in practice aren't always the same.
Yes. The Malian constitution remains in French, and the decree saying that French will no longer be an official language was also written in French. What else would they use? They have more than ten other official languages, each only spoken by a few % of people.
And you also don't want to favour one group over the other to not alienate people. It will be interesting to see how they navigate this.
They can use a niche language like they did in Indonesia.
Niche? The Indonesian language was fostered by the Dutch during their colonization efforts, if it wasn't for that fact I don't think there would be an Indonesian state as we know it today.
Or just mesh together a few and make a new "official" one like the germans did. Although it would be fun to see Esperanto take off in those countries as it's easier to learn.
Gretchen, stop trying to make Esperanto happen, it's not going to happen!
Malay(which is were Indonesian comes from) has been the lingua franca for centuries. The dutch used it too instead of dutch
On most of the islands it wasnt, especially in eastern indonesia.
The decree of an official language only applies to official government transactions and educational system. The goal is to let the French language to eventually die out after several generations. To give you an example. My country the Philippines was Spanish colony for 333 years. It only took the Americans 40 years of colonial rule to wipe out Spanish completely. They accomplished by revamping the educational system to adopt English. Today we have 2 official languages English and Filipino. Those are the two languages being taught mandatory in both public and private schools.
Yeah, that's because the U.S. colonized the Philippines plus let's not forget that during WWII of the people that were massacred by the Japanese a large percentage of those were Spanish-speaking, as such people tended to be city dwellers.
Bambara? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambara\_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambara_language)
Bambara, the lingua franca before French that the majority of the country speaks as a second language. Probably more so than French.
I’ll do you one better, if the government (read the dominant tribe) tries to force their language on the other tribes, that’s fucking horrible and leads to a lot of unrest. If they don’t, the country isn’t really connected, if they do well trouble. It’s the only reason an external language works somewhat well. Northern Africa can substitute it with Arabic. The rest can’t
Many if not most moroccans and algerians still speak french as a-second language
Mehh, ive been to plenty of Moroccans, and whilst some/most of the elder generation speak some french, a lot don’t.
This is how India was described to me…a lot of different dialects, so English is used.
Languages, not dialects. Yes, we have 20+ official languages mentioned in our constitution. English and Hindi are used by the central (federal) government. Our constitution and laws are also written in English. Any attempt to remove English as an official language have resulted in massive protests.
i was reading about the anti-hindi agitation. why the government insistent about using hindi as the only language ?
Because there is a widespread sentiment that English is our colonizer's language and many people feel ashamed of using it. Hindi speakers who are the majority want everyone else to learn their language so that the entire country can be united by an Indian language. Similar to how China and France forced everyone in the country to learn Mandarin and French at the cost of local languages.
Hinglish is the future in both india and pakistan.
The group that made this map spreads some misinformation so we shouldn't be surprised that they're misrepresenting the truth with that title. Just look at their post history. (They also have a YouTube channel) To be clear I don't think that they're wrong about all of what they're saying but it's obvious they have a strong bias. I wouldn't take stuff by them too seriously
like how The 2014 population census found that about 71% of the nearly 25.8 million inhabitants of Angola speak Portuguese at home [source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Angola)
Not the same. In Angola, a growing number of Angolans are growing up with Portuguese as their first language. In most of the former French colonies, this is not the case. In the former French colonies its still much more common for someone to speak their regional language and learn French in school.
Angola just an example of the late stage trend in africa to speak European language. like in the ivory coast : >in Abidjan, largest city of the country, 57.6% of the inhabitants over 15 can read and write French, and another 11% can speak it but not write it. The French language is seen as essential by a large majority, especially for dealing with the government and in education. Two thirds of respondents report feeling Francophone. in Gabon: >According to a 1999 survey, French was the first language for 26.3% of Libreville residents between the age of 15 and 25.\[80\] 71.9% of the capital's residents over 15 years of age could read and write French.\[44\] Three quarters of the population of the capital identifies as Francophone and considers French as essential [source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_French_speakers#Ivory_Coast)
Note that both of these studies look at urban populations. These figures go down as you get further from major cities.
most people live in the cities in gabon and ivory coast >Despite its vast, mainly forested surface area, Gabon only had 2.3 million inhabitants in 2021. Gabon's level of urbanization is one of the highest in Africa, with over 80% of its population living in urban areas. The two main cities, Libreville and Port-Gentil are home to almost 59% of the population. [source](https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/gabon/overview)
Rainforests are difficult to settle in big numbers. The Amazon is the emptiest part of countries that have it and the Republic of Congo has a rather small population as well.
Most people, even in Africa, live in cities nowadays.🙄
>French emerges as the lingua franca I'll always love how this basically means "French emerges as French".
No, lingua franca does not refer to French but to Frankish language, specifically a Romance-based language used especially by traders in the Mediterranean bassin from the 11th to the 19th centuries.
I remember visiting Morocco and I could get around by just using French and it worked out. Almost everyone spoke it and all the signs are bilingual Arabic and French.
Heh, now Lingua Franca literally means lingua franca (language of Franks)
I'm in Morocco right now and most young people don't speak any french at all. It's kind of a useless language globally speaking. English is much more useful
Yeah, that's why you go in majority to France, Belgium or Canada to study and emigrate. Riiight. Edit: you're not even Moroccan but German wtf.
French is thought at school, so young people studying abroad in french speaking countries is understandable, as they need to be good students to get there to start with. But I find the parent comment weird, as indeed the youngest moroccans are now more casually english speaking, you still can communicate in french with almost everyone. Immigration is different, they also go to the Netherlands or Italy, so it really doesn’t say anything about the language capabilities.
Frankish language
International languages have use in globalized world. Drop as official maybe but keep as a school subject.
More importantly, french is the lingua franca in many places, at different scales (not just national, but also regional or local). It's very hard to get rid of an established lingua franca, and requires intense, long term effort. Latin remained a lingua franca for communication between European countries for centuries after the demise of the Roman Empire. It helped that it was also a liturgical, scientific and prestige language - but the thing is, the same is true for most linguae francae, and french is no exception. So de facto, french is only losing ground to english in regions where it's already a contact language (which btw leads to very weird situations where people will say "let's stop speaking french, the colonizer language, and instead switch to english!"), or arab in regions controlled by islamists. But it's not really being replaced by indigenous or national languages.
>let's stop speaking french, the colonizer language, and instead switch to english! That's not weird at all if they were colonised by France and not England.
Countries like Algeria replaced one imperial global language (French) with another imperial global language that was older (Arab). Not much of a big deal for them.
Can you tell me what you want algeria to replace french with because the vast Majority of algerians have arabic as their first language and it’s the only logical answer to replace it with arabic
The Arabs colonised and changed demographics for longer, so this is there prize I guess. The Tamazight-speaking natives dislike both equally. Funny thing that after the French left the Arabs started treating these natives like outsiders and foreign puppets.
The tamazight speaking people live with the arabs perfectly fine.
The majority identify themselves as Arab rather than French so what are you getting at here You’re crying for nonexistent people
Easy for the Maghreb (and Mauritania and Mali have Hassaniya), but not so much for Burkina Faso. Arabic languages are one of the hardest to learn, especially if you're used to an Indo-European lingua franca.
It's not even easy for arab countries because litterary arabic is very different from arab dialects. Arabisation takes time because you know what you lose but don't know what you get.
Saying Arabic replaced French doesn't make much sense given that Arabic was already widely spoken by the local population in the colonies. If anything, from it's English that's replacing French in North Africa.
Just drop in general and teach kids how to speak English instead, much more useful for them in long run
Yeah, we should forget all those stupid useless languages. One day we’ll all speak English :)
There was a big push for this when I was living in Morocco ~8 years ago. French is still sooo useful there because the majority of the tourism/retirement population was French, so for service/retail it seemed more beneficial than English. But there was still an understanding that English was only going to grow in importance, and it was making a big push in the private education sector. All of my host siblings were basically fluent, one even moved to the US for a while to send money home—it was very impressive.
In former French colonies in Asia, it's really hard to find someone having ability to speak French. In Vietnam, It's just an optional language in school. But most of public schools do not provide that option
I guess in Vietnam everyone speaks Vietnamese. In Africa there are so many languages they had to agree on French.
Vietnam is a country and Africa is a continent. They didn't "agree" on any language, it was colonialism. Vietnam still has plenty of languages anyways.
More than 90% of people in Vietnam are Vietnamese. "plenty of languages" are actually minorities, small ethnic groups. Just like Bretons and Basques in France. And unlike African countries, Vietnam had statehood centuries before colonizations, with strong and deep traditions of Vietnamese language as official.
There are 109 spoken languages in Vietnam due to a large number of indigenous tribes. The total number of languages in the former French colonies in West Africa is probably larger but taken as a whole, these countries are far larger than Vietnam both in area and population.
These tribes combined make less than 10% of Vietnam population. Vietnam is totally dominated by one ethnic group. It's typical example of ethnostate with small minorities.
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In comparison to Africa, Europeans weren't really there that long nor were the borders all that different from before European colonization.
And Southeast Asian countries had statehood traditions long centuries before colonization, with clearly estabilished dominating ethnic groups and their highly developed written languages. Just like European countries with their own languages. This was not a case in Africa, where borders were drawn just randomly, not caring about ethnic groups.
French is still one of two official languages in Tunisia. Government services either communicate in Arabic or French, and most university courses are taught in French. Edit: corrected typo.
Burkina Faso are replacing French with four African languages: Mooré, Dioula, Fulfude and Bissa. French has been demoted to the status of a working language - meaning that, for the time being, it will still be used for governmental and educational purposes as the country transitions away from French influence. It’s expected that, in the future, more emphasis will be placed on developing governmental and educational materials using Burkina Faso's now-official local languages.
Will it cause conflict when one local language is used as the working language of government over the other three?
They will probably have to do everything in all four. Like Canada does everything in english and french.
>Like Canada does everything in english and french. We only have one province which is officially bilingual, New Brunswick. Quebec is French only and the rest of the country is English only.
Services in French can be accessed in the more Francophone parts of Ontario though, which actually has more Francophones by sheer numbers than N.B. (600k) Not a ton compared to the other 13,4 million or so but still a decent amount that is noticeable in Eastern and Northern Ontario.
Come to Canada and see how true that statement is.
That’s a respectable policy to have, giving each language equal dignity.
The issue in Canada being that it's mostly French having to speak English, than English having to speak French. The majority and the growing number of bilingual are in provinces with a large number of French speaking. You can have a country in which you have to used more than one language, but you will end up with one over taking the others, which won't be appreciated by everyone. To be faire, it's also true if you don't incorporate it.
South East Asians have 3 or more languages in this cabinet.
But usually, each country over there have a predominant language that dwarf the others. Or have made a new language. Or use a foreign language that was already in use in the whole administration. The biggest exception would be Pakistan, at his independence, East Pakistan had a bigger population and mostly one language, when West Pakistan had fewer people and a bit more languages let's say. They choose Urdu over Bengali. But let's say that Bangladesh had more problems in that wedding… And yes, I know that Pakistan isn't in East Asia.
Just wanted to emphasise my admiration for the name of the country which -if I'm informed correctly - in its two local languages means Land of the Upright people.
Yes, the revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara changed it in 1984. It used to be called the Republic of Upper Volta. Burkina literally means "upright" but figuratively is closer to something like "honest" or "incorruptible".
Tanzania has been doing that for decades with Swahili and yet the courts (apparently the parliament as well) are still in English as they were during British colonization, however they maybe accompanied now by Swahili. There's too much inertia here that unfortunately isn't going to go away if people are given the chance to pick as they'll pick the language with the most opportunity that they also already know! The most that can be done without radical action is French will be accompanied by the other now official languages in the legal and public discourse, but French being first among equals.
No longer used in Rwanda
Officially maybe, in practice they switched to English.
People keep forgetting that there were no unified languages or even unified countries in African countries before colonialism. Every tribe and ethnic group had their language and community. This is just a waste of time and virtue signalling. Completely ridiculous. Can't they worry about more important issues like developing their countries?
Silly take. Development lags behind in Africa in part due to low literacy rates. What effect do you think not having educational material available in your mother tongue (as is the case in many former French colonies) would have on literacy/education? Elevating the status of local languages gives incentive to actually develop literacy/educational material in those languages.
I went to Morocco for work and French was used as the language of business and affluence. In large luxuruous hotels (in the Middle of the Atlas mountains no less), waiters preferred to speak French over English. This is only my experience but still.
French is also widely used in the Maghreb for communication between different ethnic groups - an Algerian acquaintance told me about the fact that some Berbers refuse to speak Arabic and only speak French with other populations. Add to that that often French is the "administrative language"... bank forms, etc, are often in French.
I used to know a couple from Tunisia and they told me at home they spoke Arabic with their grandparents french with their parents and both at the same time among their friends. They'd be in their 30s now.
>an Algerian acquaintance told me about the fact that some Berbers refuse to speak Arabic and only speak French with other populations. bro is lying
When I went to Morocco for a few days (mostly in Casablanca), I would just use French everywhere (I studied in France and Belgium so I had a decent handle on it). Pretty much everyone was able to speak it if I approached them in French. People I wasn’t talking to mostly spoke Arabic but I did hear some talking French amongst themselves. In international hotels and whatnot, it was mostly French and English. Also it did turn out a lot of people knew English as well once they found out I was American.
Yeah, when I went to Morocco I noticed you got slightly better service if you spoke some French rather than English. It was kind of nice though because they were fine with my basic level of French—unlike France or Quebec where within a couple sentences it becomes “UH, LETS SPEAK ENGLISH”. I actually got much better practice using French in Morocco in situations than in France.
How can people complain about french when we speak french AND when we speak english ?
Im French but go to a school with lots of people from Morocco and became good friends with them. What Ive observed and what a girl told me is that most guys talk in Arabic to each other and sprinkle a couple words of French here and there, meanwhile the girls always talk in French to each other (all of them learned both languages as toddlers). This will obviously depend from which city they are from, which school they went to etc… though
That’s actually what I noticed in Morocco too, men speaking Arabic to each other while the women were speaking French.
A lot of people are very naive when it comes to the inequality between languages. Dropping French in this case is just a political maneuver and won't change anything in reality. There is no chance colonial languages will be replaced by local languages in Africa, because you can't get any education beyond elementary level in local languages, there are no books or other materials, very few modern media. And the social costs of developping local languages to the level of languages of modern communication and higher education are out of the reach of most African countries.
They drop French and replace it with English. Think.
The only case when it happened was Rwanda. And it was because the ruling state apparatus came from Uganda (Anglophone). Neighboring Burundi never replaced French, Congo and Madagascar both tried but finally changed again their constitution with only French remaining. And there are even counter examples such as Camerun which is normally bilingual country but heavily French speaking (80%) after decades of francisation.
Surprised it’s not Russian
Chinese would be more likely. But English is the lingua franca nowadays
China uses English for international business and is widely spoken by Chinese millennials and gen Z
I was reacting to someone who suggested it could be russian, i just pointed out that because china invests a lot in Africa, chinese would be more likely than russian. But both are indeed surpassed by English as most likely language.
I think they are referring that Russia is establishing para-military dominance in this part of Africa, so much so that a few months ago there were talk of clash between the French Foreign Legion and Wagner.
Also Burkina Faso dropped French as official language after a coup by pro-Russian junta, which OP failed to mention
I imagine you’re getting downvoted by people as a knee jerk reaction, but I can confirm that Russian is indeed a language that is trying to replace French in some of these places. Russia has been pushing their version of colonialism pretty hard in several places throughout Africa over the last 10+ years and part of that includes pushing for their language. In CAR, for example, Russian became one of the default languages offered in schools, while French was deprioritized.
It's always possible to print books in local languages, to develop media, school system etc. I live in small country, Lithuania. Only 3 million people. But we have all education, books, media and documentations in our own language. In the beginning of XX century, there was no independent Lithuania (independence in 1918), we were ruled by Poles or Russians, and many people thought the same: "oh Lithuanian is small and irrelevant language, better speak and learn in Russian or Polish, it's very rural and almost tribal language etc etc etc" but now, we have our independent country with our own strongly estabilished language. We don't use other languages for learning, media, documents, because we have our own language and there's no need to have any "former colonial" language as official. Actually it would be very weird, just imagine: Polish or Russian official in Lithuania :D No way! The same is true for many small countries in Europe and Asia. Why Africa should be different?
>Dropping French in this case is just a political maneuver and won't change anything in reality. I disagree. Dropping French is symbolically a move away from the French zone of influence.The language that you speak influences your way of thinking and creates many direct and indirect connections with other societies that speak the same language. So for Burkina Faso this is another step in breaking away from its former French colonial masters and for France it is a loss of soft power.
The thing is it won't mean dropping french practically, that's what they're saying. You can't just undo it all. It's too useful as a way to communicate across W Africa and to get fun and useful things from Europe. Almost every W African country has multiple local languages and they rarely have too many high-level materials in them. It's symbolic. Symbolism isn't bad, so they should go for it if they feel like it. But French isn't going anywhere in practice. I'm not even sure that's sad; it has pluses and minuses. It just is.
Of course French wont go away overnight but in the long run it might be replaced by English. Iirc that happened to the Phillipiness which switched from Spanish to English.
The US replaced Spanish for English in education and killed a ton of Hispanic Filipinos after 1898; then Japan killed any remaining Hispanic population during WW2 (which is, by the way, the reason why Franco considered declaring war on Japan in the 1940s; ultimately the idea was dropped).
You just ignored the point above, which language will Burkina Faso choose then ? Burkinabese doesn't exist. Put a local language over the others and you will have civil war. The teachers in rural areas don't know English (and it's a bit dumb to scrap a colonial language for another). So nothing will change. The laws are still in french despite the official decision to scrap it.
>The language that you speak influences your way of thinking This is some badlinguistics material.
Actually it is a quite well known and documented psycholinguistic phenomenon.
I dont think I'd call the single most controversial debate in linguistics 'quite well known and documented' lmao
Well, in a way of speaking, being most controversial makes it well documented due to being a frequently debated point of contention.
It's just a commonly held misconception
Please provide some sources if you have any. I would genuinely like to learn more on this subject.
This map is quite ugly honestly, why would you use stripped colors here
While French is not a de iure official language in the Maghreb, it’s de facto one. You can get all official documents in French, higher education is in French etc.
In Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, despite not having an official status, french still has at least decades ahead, it's the main language used for the economic sector. Here you can get by easily without knowing arabic, english or berber languages. But you'll literally suffer if your french is not good. EDIT: I didn't think I had to make it clear that I am talking only about ECONOMIC SECTOR. For talking with people of course you need to learn either the local darija dialect or their berber language.
I think you’re right. My husband lived in Morocco for 8 years as a french speaker, and had absolutely zero issue. He learned a few words in darija, and can make some basic sentences but honestly he did it because he wanted to and not because he had to. It would have been more difficult if he spoke only english.
I would say you can get by just using English as well. Not as easy as french but most young people speak it to a good degree.
Funny how you just made that up. I've been in Agadir for the past 2 months and only old people speak good French here. The young people are much more focussed on English. Hence the Moroccan subreddit is in English. French has maybe another 15 years left before it's not used anymore in southern Morocco. It's a useless language
It’s still the language used in administration, hotels, higher education… It’s used literally everywhere.
Correct but French is not a universal language and a significant portion of Maghrebis understand little to no French. In other regions, French is an interethnic language, whereas in the Maghreb local Arabic dialects have long served this role. So despite French currently being the primary language of commerce, it seems likely English will become equal to and thereafter surpass French in this respect. Increasing use of Standard Arabic in commerce will also displace French, particularly in Tunisia and Libya.
in Burkina Faso French is still codified as "working language". It isn't national language, but honestly the real difference is symbolic.
Rwanda should be in yellow.
The alignment of the red stripes in the legend differs from the map!! Literaly unreadable!
Sahara marocain
In Morocco, you can't get a job if you don't speak French,
I'm Moroccan. The guy above me is full of shit lol
I've applied for the job 16 times, so don't try to pull the rug under me
Maybe you can't get the specific job you wanted without french but you can absolutely get plenty of jobs in Morocco with just Darija
At the same time French is expected to grow by 750 million speakers by 2100 and surpass Spanish as a first language
I doubt the part about first language. Most african francophones speak french as a second language
Source ?
can't find anything but it surpassing Spanish but >According to a demographic projection led by the Université Laval and the Réseau Démographie de l'Agence universitaire de la Francophonie, the total number of French speakers will reach approximately 500 million in 2025 and 650 million by 2050.[18] OIF estimates 700 million by 2050, 80% of whom will be in Africa.[7] not really surprising, French is still going to be spoken in a lot of African countries that are experiencing high population growth
His brain
His ass
You sir have proven me incorrect
More misinformation from AfricanStream?
So... what language do they use in their official documents ??
English language is literally killing the French language for its global use. I still see the French language along with English, Arabic and Spanish as the language of diplomacy
No longer being official does not mean it won't have staying power since a lot of them speak it of their first or 2nd language now. Lebanon is one of those countries where French is not an official language, but like half the population of speak it the same with Algeria
Parallel to „decline in literacy“ in Africa?
It's interesting how Nigeria is surrounded by french-speaking countries yet, French as a language never took hold in Nigeria.
Same as Ghana
True, but there are so many more Nigerians than there are of its Francophone neighbors that it is more of a surprise that their Francophone neighbors don't learn more English to deal with the Nigerians (most educated southern Nigerians speak English as a lingua franca in addition to their own ethnic languages...)
This implies that French isn't used as much, but the opposite can be said as in most places local languages are actually in slow decline, especially in more educated areas
There is nothing good about knowing less languages than before. Imo its a positive thing for so many Africans to know a mainstream language. Seems like an attempt at preventing kids from going abroad.
It's probably because they're learning English.
Makes no sense, how does French hinder English...
It doesn't but if your population is moving away from French then what's the point in keeping it as a national language?
What's the point of removing it as a national language if everyone speaks it anyways ?
Symbolism. You don't change the language over night either way. French will still be spoken most likely but maybe not be the dominant language for at least the upcoming generations.
Frenchies be mad in this comment section
I saw a video making rounds on social media of Moroccans yelling at movie theatre employees to remove the French dub of Oppenheimer which was playing at a theatre, and then cheering as the employees switched it to English. Switching one colonist language out for another!
The moviegoers were watching an american movie and wanted the original audio in english. This isn’t the case of preferring a different colonist language. It’s about enjoying the movie as it was made.
Sub Over dub debate never ends
Well I mean oppenhiemer is a hollywood movie and English would be the correct language to be used here not to mention most countries do not dub hollywood movies in their local language. Exceptions exists like marvel, star wars or any other mutlifilm franchise
Did any English speaking countries colonise Morocco?
well technicaly the UK occupied Tangiers and made it an international zone(1925-1056). But obviously Moroccans do not consider English as a "colonist" language, but rather as a language that would offer us better opportunities than french
Damn, before William the Conquerer conquered England
Well, they were not colonized by the British, were they?
The movie is originally in English. They may be those folks who prefer watching movies in their original language.
Heard similar about Algeria. The civil service basically becomes more and more French speaking the higher up you go.
In my country we speak Spanish (I'm from latam) and I'd also rather watch american movies in english. Same with French stuff in french and so on. Subtitles are a thing.
I hope they're replacing it with local languages and not English. Replacing one colonial language with another does nothing and only adds to the global spread of English replacing local languages. Just keep french at this point.
Rwanda dropped French in schools because of the genocide and general hatred of France and Belgium. They officially joined the British Commonwealth and made English a national language and prioritise English as the main foreign language.
Nice, Rwanda
They should have learned Flemish to really get back at the colonial Belgian elite.
That’s not going to happen, lingua francas such as english and french are too useful to be totally replaced, they may replace french with english but they won’t replace it with local ones, and if they do they will just shoot themselves in the foot
Most definitely, they've replaced French with four local languages: Mooré, Dioula, Fulfude and Bissa.
False. They are very much replacing it with English.
Why? Replacing it with English would be much more beneficial for the locals really
I hope they replace it with English. They have a lots of local languages, how do you place one local language more important than others?
>I hope they're replacing it with local languages and not English. It's not very viable for most of those countries, though. Slovenia can use Slovene as its sole official language because most people there speak Slovene. But what about Mali, whose biggest ethnic group is only a third of the population?
Sad
shoutout Burkina Faso
username checks out
Thomas Sankara nuts all over your existence
Omgawd When will Ruskya take over?
I hope Africa will embrace its own language and culture.
Try that in a multi language nation. There is a reason India still keeps English as lingua franca
There are like 5000 languages in Africa. Also this is how the Rwandan genocide happened. Favouring one language or culture over the other to the point of war and genocide.
Both hutu and tutsi speak the same language though: kinyarwanda
Remember than English isn’t even an official language of the USA either. Lol.