Why does Africa have so many languages? | Hacker News Reader

Why does Africa have so many languages?

csmonitor.com

23 pointssergeant314 comments

A glib answer would be "because it's a huge continent"? In fairness, I think this is actually a pretty decent article about a complex topic, but I can't help but think it's the wrong question to ask.

How is it the wrong question to ask? What value judgement are you making? I'm curious because its hard to imagine any question being wrong(to ask) if its asked genuinely and without malice.

Sure, completely agreed. I didn't mean 'wrong' in terms of being ethically wrong. I think the article itself contains a more insightful question: "Is genetic diversity linked to linguistic diversity?"

> I think the article itself contains a more insightful question: "Is genetic diversity linked to linguistic diversity?"

Why is that an insightful question? I wouldn't have expected a strong correlation, and from the article, there doesn't appear to be one.

At the risk of being too dismissive, I thought the reasons for linguistic diversity were already well known (that is, physical and political separation and a lack of trade/communication).

If one were to employ the same test/criteria, I wonder how many languages are spoken in North America? It also makes me wonder how many people in North America don't speak any significant amount of Spanish or English. There are some for various reasons, but not many. At the same time, the article refers to an SSIL document which lists USA as having 422 living languages--which would be 7th in the world for most active languages. However, in practice most public life is carried out in Spanish or English. Will the same phenomenon in store for Africa?

There are millions of people in the Americas that don't speak English or Spanish. (Even ignoring the 200 million speakers of Brazilian Portuguese.)

If you combine just Mayan, Nahuatl, Mixtec, and Zapotec you're already in the millions.

"because it's a huge continent and humans have been there a very long time"

Also, while there are many languages in Africa, the number of coherent families isn't necessarily that large. For example, Bambara is part of a larger family of languages that are more like highly-divergent dialects (or so I'm given to understand -- I was lucky to communicate at all in my broken Bambara and pidgin French). By the same token, Arabic has a multitude of spoken dialects that are barely intelligible to each other.

I also think that the question suffers by failing to compare the range of languages found in other regions. The geographic distribution of the Indo-European language facility is comparable to Africa and contains around 500 known languages, though it is likely that at least as many were extinguished through various means (peaceful and not) over the centuries. Linguistic diversity is the norm, not the exception, though large-scale political consolidation tends to mask this.

I get your point, but even still. The Niger-Congo family is probably relatively analogous to the Indo-European family (both in internal diversity, geographic spread, and association with the spread of pastoralism/agriculture), but even still you've got the very convoluted Afro-Asiatic family, Khoi-San languages, numerous language isolates, &c. &c. But in Europe you only have the Indo-European family and Basque.

I lived in Papua New Guinea for two years, where linguistic diversity is higher than any other country.

There was however a few languages that everyone spoke. Tok Pisin was a pidgin language spoke by almost everyone, and English (due to it being the language used in schools) ran a close second.

Despite the relatively few languages spoken in Europe, we don't have a universal dialect that everyone understands. The vast majority of us are monolingual.

> we don't have a universal dialect that everyone understands.

Isn't that the role filled by English?

If you get stuck outside of large cities in most European countries, you will not have much luck with English. Young people will probably know some, but if you need help from an average person, you better know at least some words in their language.

I don't have numbers, but I really doubt that the vast majority of european countries don't have english as a second language. Sure the populations in some european countries have a limited command of english, but in others it is practically universal.

Just from personal experience, people in the nordic countries generally have a near-native command of english. In French and Germany it's a bit hit and miss, but younger people generally speaks english well enough to be able to communicate. In Italy it's pretty bad though, you can tell that just by all the signs with engrish.

The appropriate question shouldn't be "Why does Africa have so many languages?" but rather "Why do developed nation-states have so few?"

High levels of synchronic linguistic diversity should be considered the pre-modern norm, even aside from the usual troubles of distinguishing languages from dialects. And nation-states are very common these days.

The answer is probably mostly language standardization, promotion of elite lects, network effects, and official promotion of the standard language, often alongside the abuse of minority language communities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com