3 ms·

It seems to me this article is pushing an ideal that doesn't really exist. The article itself admits that "Africa’s Swahili-speaking zone now extends across a

It seems to me this article is pushing an ideal that doesn't really exist. The article itself admits that "Africa’s Swahili-speaking zone now extends across a full third of the continent." That excludes two-thirds of the continent. For example, in South Africa, there are a whopping eleven official languages, including Xhosa and Zulu (both so-called "Bantu" languages like Swahili), but Swahili is not one of them. The same is true of most other Southern African countries: Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia, Zimbabwe. As another example, Wikipedia has a list of 46 (!) languages spoken in Angola: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Angola https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Angola . Swahili is not included. There has been an effort to begin teaching Swahili in schools in both South Africa and Botswana, at least. But such efforts don't have a good track record of success. Take a look at Ireland, where students are taught the Irish language in school but, for the most part, are terrible at it. It seems unlikely that imposing a language on countries that don't natively speak it will succeed.

kzrdude 5y ago
Not Africa but if 46 languages gets an exclam then maybe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_people_of_New_Guinea https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_people_of_New_Gui... is interesting to you :)
jgwil2 5y ago
> so-called "Bantu" languages Are you implying that Bantu languages don't exist?
- bruce511 5y ago
  I can't speak for the original poster, but Bantu as a word has pergoritive associations, which mean it's not commonly used today. In South Africa during apartheid, Bantu was used as a synonym for Black. The "self governing" regions were known as Bantustans and so on. Like with most words, Bantu has a neutral actual meaning, but it's been corrupted by use and would not typically be used by a polite (white) person today - at least in Southern Africa.
  - rvense 5y ago
    Interesting, I didn't know that. In linguistics, it is the common (only) word for the family of languages that Swahili belongs to.
    - antonvs 5y ago
      Linguists may need to pay a bit more attention to their own use of language. See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30564864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30564864 (Ignore the first sentence)
- antonvs 5y ago
  I think you may have an incorrect understanding of the meaning of "so-called". See: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/so-called https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/so-called Beyond that, "Bantu" is a colonial term, coined by German colonist Wilhelm Bleek. Bleek has been described as "the first serious thinker about and systematic theorist of ‘race’ in colonial South Africa." He studied African languages but called them "primitive", comparing them to the communication of non-human primates. Not surprisingly given this history, the word "Bantu" was notoriously used by the apartheid government of South Africa as a catch-all term for indigenous people, regardless of their actual ethnicity. But somehow, linguists haven't gotten any of these memos and continue to use the term to describe a family of languages. That may be because Western linguistics has deeply racist roots: > Western linguistics particularly its study of Eurasian languages, arose against a background of Eurocentrism, colonial racism, nationalism and related theories, later espoused by Nazism and other White Supremacy movements. The following article argues that significant traces of this racism remain in contemporary Indology and South Asian lingustics—casting a long shadow over how the world is viewed. -- https://www.jstor.org/stable/48505004 https://www.jstor.org/stable/48505004
  - LudwigNagasena 5y ago
    > But somehow, linguists haven't gotten any of these memos and continue to use the term to describe a family of languages. That may be because Western linguistics has deeply racist roots Or, because linguists aren’t crazy Twitter-obsessed kids who want to purify everything.
    - antonvs 5y ago
      Tucker Carlson would be proud of you for that take.
      - LudwigNagasena 5y ago
        Am I supposed to feel guilt by association because of that?
  - jgwil2 5y ago

kzrdude 5y ago

Not Africa but if 46 languages gets an exclam then maybe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_people_of_New_Guinea https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_people_of_New_Gui... is interesting to you :)

jgwil2 5y ago

> so-called "Bantu" languages Are you implying that Bantu languages don't exist?

bruce511 5y ago
I can't speak for the original poster, but Bantu as a word has pergoritive associations, which mean it's not commonly used today. In South Africa during apartheid, Bantu was used as a synonym for Black. The "self governing" regions were known as Bantustans and so on. Like with most words, Bantu has a neutral actual meaning, but it's been corrupted by use and would not typically be used by a polite (white) person today - at least in Southern Africa.
- rvense 5y ago
  Interesting, I didn't know that. In linguistics, it is the common (only) word for the family of languages that Swahili belongs to.
  - antonvs 5y ago
    Linguists may need to pay a bit more attention to their own use of language. See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30564864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30564864 (Ignore the first sentence)
antonvs 5y ago
I think you may have an incorrect understanding of the meaning of "so-called". See: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/so-called https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/so-called Beyond that, "Bantu" is a colonial term, coined by German colonist Wilhelm Bleek. Bleek has been described as "the first serious thinker about and systematic theorist of ‘race’ in colonial South Africa." He studied African languages but called them "primitive", comparing them to the communication of non-human primates. Not surprisingly given this history, the word "Bantu" was notoriously used by the apartheid government of South Africa as a catch-all term for indigenous people, regardless of their actual ethnicity. But somehow, linguists haven't gotten any of these memos and continue to use the term to describe a family of languages. That may be because Western linguistics has deeply racist roots: > Western linguistics particularly its study of Eurasian languages, arose against a background of Eurocentrism, colonial racism, nationalism and related theories, later espoused by Nazism and other White Supremacy movements. The following article argues that significant traces of this racism remain in contemporary Indology and South Asian lingustics—casting a long shadow over how the world is viewed. -- https://www.jstor.org/stable/48505004 https://www.jstor.org/stable/48505004
- LudwigNagasena 5y ago
  > But somehow, linguists haven't gotten any of these memos and continue to use the term to describe a family of languages. That may be because Western linguistics has deeply racist roots Or, because linguists aren’t crazy Twitter-obsessed kids who want to purify everything.
  - antonvs 5y ago
    Tucker Carlson would be proud of you for that take.
    - LudwigNagasena 5y ago
      Am I supposed to feel guilt by association because of that?
- jgwil2 5y ago