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:
“...I ... believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something—a great deal—to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing; and that we can deflect words, by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Neither Aristotelian nor Russellian rules give the exact logic of any expression of ordinary language; for ordinary language has no exact logic.”
—Sir Peter Frederick Strawson (b. 1919)