Page 71 - Languages Victoria December 2019

Languages Victoria
By the way, all human languages worldwide ultimately originate from Africa, because humankind’s cradle was in Africa, and humans already had language when they migrated into other continents.
What about written languages in Africa?
Most African languages were only spoken – until the colonial period. Originally living in small communities, there was no reason to develop a written form, all essential information could be transmitted orally. However, some African peoples eventually lived in circumstances where they felt they needed writing, so they either developed a script or adopted one. African script development begins 5,000 years ago with the hieroglyphics of Pharaonic Egypt and also encompasses the 3,000 years-old Punic script used during the Carthagian Empire, which has survived in the “Tifinagh” script of the Tuareg and is being used as “Neo-Tifinagh” in Morocco today. In Ethiopia, a scriptural tradition developed some 1,600 years ago based on a model from South Arabia that was brought along by immigrants, giving rise to the current Ethiopian script "Fidäl". The oldest major input for writing African languages was the Arabic script since the Middle Ages. More recent local scripts have been developed under the influence of European colonialism and Christian missionaries in the 19th Century with the arrival of the Latin script. Since colonial times, many African languages have undergone basic scripturalisation in Roman letters, certainly all the major African languages now have orthographies and the beginnings of literatures.
Are the constitutions of the countries also written in the original African languages, or are they only available in the languages of the colonial rulers?
Yes and no. In principle, such documents are written in the “official”
European languages or in available in African languages as well. South Africa, for example, has eleven official languages, besides English and Afrikaans they’ve chosen nine Bantu languages, and the Constitution is available in all eleven official languages. In Kenya, Swahili has recently been raised to the rank of an official language besides English. Kenya has had English as “official
Arabic. In few cases, the constitutions are
Getty Image: Juanita De Paola
Volume 23 Number 1
Page 71