Are most people in sub-Saharan Africa multilingual?
HD-H: Yes, they have to be. A typical Tanzanian, for example, speaks at least two or three languages. They speak their own ethnic language, perhaps the language of a neighboring ethnic group or two, their national languageñSwahiliñand probably the language of colonial legacy. It’s not typically different from circumstances in Miami, where proximity and necessity have made speaking both English and Spanish a part of life there. If a group speaking a third language moved there in large numbers, people in Miami would surely pick that language up, too. It’s important to know that there are not “thousands” of languages in sub-Saharan Africa, as many people seem to think. One reason for this misconception is that different people have given different names to the same languages. You had missionary groups and colonial administrators, for example, each naming a language without consulting one another. You have dialects of the same language which for political reasons assume “separate language”
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