National Day and the Languages of Cameroon: Part 2

On Wednesday, we celebrated Tuesday's National Day in Cameroon. Since Cameroon is such a wonderfully diverse country, we only managed to cover the Niger-Congo language family that a great number of Cameroon's languages belong to. In the same vein, today we'll cover the remaining language groups found in Cameroon.

The linguistically diverse continent of Africa.

Afro-Asiatic Languages

The largest remaining language family is the Afro-Asiatic languages. There are no less than 55 of these languages present in Cameroon and the languages in this family spread from the Middle East to the western coast of North Africa. The Afro-Asiatic language family is thought to have the longest recorded history of any language family, and is the fourth largest in the world with over 350 million native speakers worldwide.

Arabic is the most widely spoken Afro-Asiatic language, and its native speakers make up nearly two-thirds of the Afro-Asiatic language speakers. That said, this figure does include all varieties of Arabic, many of which are not mutually intelligible.

Ubangian Languages

The Ubangian languages are principally spoken in the Central African Republic, though 4 of them can be found in Cameroon. While the entire language family only has around 2 to 3 million speakers, it is unlikely that you will find a Ubangian language being spoken in every Cameroonian city you visit.

While we have considered them as a separate group for the purpose of this post, some linguists have posited that the Ubangian languages be placed within the Niger-Congo language family in its Adamawa branch.

Nilo-Saharan Languages

The last of the language families to be encountered in Cameroon are the Nilo-Saharan languages. The Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken across the length and breadth of Africa, so it is hardly surprising that a couple of them are also spoken in Cameroon.

Pidgins

While those are the remaining language families present in Cameroon, the country's linguistic diversity has led to the development of a number of lingua francas in Cameroon. Cameroonian Pidgin English (CPE) is a creole language based on English that is spoken natively by 5% of the population. While only one in twenty Cameroonians speak this pidgin as a first language, around half of the population are estimated to be speakers of it and use some form of it.

In addition to CPE there is also Camfranglais, which is a mix of French, English, and Cameroonian Pidgin English. The name comes from the French words for Cameroonian, French, and English, camerounais, français, and anglais. While Camfranglais is not as widely spoken as CPE, it is commonly spoken in areas where French and English speakers mix, particularly Cameroon's larger cities.

Well that's it for Cameroon's language families. We'll be back on Monday with our weekly language profile. See you then!

Part 1 | Part 2

Día De La Independencia: The Languages Of Uruguay

This weekend we've been lucky with independence days, with yesterday being Ukraine's and today being Uruguay's. As per usual, we felt it only fitting to honour Uruguay's national day with a look at the country's linguistic landscape.

Of course, Día de la Independencia means "Independence Day" in Spanish, and today was the day Uruguay declared its independence from the Brazilian Empire in 1825. It wasn't until 1828 that Uruguay's independence would officially be recognised on August 28th.

Maldonado, Uruguay

Uruguay, as a nation, is not as linguistically diverse as one may think. Though several other countries in South America feature many indigenous languages, Uruguay does not. There are very few descendants of the native peoples, and sadly Uruguay is thought to have no surviving indigenous languages.

However, the Spanish utilised in the country of Uruguay is particularly interesting. A large number of Italian immigrants have helped shape the Spanish language employed in the area. The mixture of Spanish and Italian used in the region is known as Cocoliche and makes use of hybrid words and mixed vocabulary.

English has a significant presence as a second language, as it does in many parts of the world. Recently it is becoming more and more common amongst younger Uruguayans and those in business.

Given that Uruguay was previously part of the Brazilian Empire, it should come as no surprise that Portuguese is also spoken in parts of the country, especially the areas nearer Brazil.

In border areas, the language of Portuñol is prominent. It is a mixture or pidgin of Portuguese and Rioplatense Spanish, a particular type of Spanish that is spoken principally in Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Grande do Sul in Brazil.

Pidgins: Portuñol

A pidgin is created when two languages mix and simplify in order to facilitate communication between groups that do not have a shared language.

Not to be confused with creoles, which we'll leave for another day, pidgins are not native languages in their own right. They are very unlikely to have any native speakers since each group uses their own native language with other group members, so the pidgin is only used when communicating with another party. Pidgins are normally used in business and trade situations.

Pidgins were common before the coup.

Pidgins tend to be simplified and rarely feature any complicated sentence structures and often have tenses which are apparent by the use of a specific word. An example of this is the use of the word will in English to refer to an activity in the future.

They also use basic vowels and avoid complicated morphology and irregularities. Their purpose, after all, is to facilitate communication, often to sell things.

Some of the most well-known pidgins include Portuñol, points if you worked out that it's a pidgin of Portuguese (português) and Spanish (español). Obviously very clever people named it. Portuñol usually occurs along the Brazilian border where the neighbouring country speaks Spanish.

Green is Portuñol... almost inevitable, really.

Portuñol also refers to code-switching (the process of changing between one language and another) which can be common amongst speakers of Spanish and Portuguese due to the similarities between these two languages.