Language
In the Horn of Africa, Afro-Asiatic languages predominate, including Amharic, Oromo, Tigrinya and Somali. Further south in the African Great Lakes region, Bantu languages like Kikuyu and Kamba are most widely spoken; Nilo-Saharan languages, such as Luo, Kalenjin and Maasai, are also spoken in lesser numbers. Swahili, with at least 80 million speakers (as a first or second language), is an important trade language in the Great Lakes area, and has official status in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda. European languages such as English, Portuguese, and to a lesser extent French, remain important in higher institutions in some parts of the larger region.
Read more about this topic: East Africa
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,
Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out
At every joint and motive of her body.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“He had not failed to observe how harmoniously gigantic language and a microscopic topic go together.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)