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:
“Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. We are too familiar with the language of action to notice at first an anomaly: the ‘it’ of ‘Jones did it slowly, deliberately,...’ seems to refer to some entity, presumably an action, that is then characterized in a number of ways.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night;
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“Theoretically, I grant you, there is no possibility of error in necessary reasoning. But to speak thus “theoretically,” is to use language in a Pickwickian sense. In practice, and in fact, mathematics is not exempt from that liability to error that affects everything that man does.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)