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Should I learn Afrikaans? - Your Opinion

 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages Post Reply
16 messages over 2 pages: 1 2 
brian91
Senior Member
Ireland
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Studies: French

 
 Message 9 of 16
13 April 2010 at 11:51pm | IP Logged 
I was thinking, maybe if I wanted to live in Africa I should learn Swahili? I might start a thread trying to establish a profile on it, like on this website ('chic factor' etc).

Wikipedia wrote:
At the present time, some 90 percent of approximately 39 million Tanzanians speak Swahili.[13] Kenya's population is comparable, but the prevalence of Swahili is lower, though still widespread. Most educated Kenyans are able to communicate fluently in Swahili, since it is a compulsory subject in school from grade one. The five eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (to be subdivided in 2009) are Swahili speaking. Nearly half the 66 million Congolese reportedly speak it;[14] and it is starting to rival Lingala as the most important national language of that country. In Uganda, the Baganda generally don't speak Swahili, but it is in common use among the 25 million people elsewhere in the country, and is currently being implemented in schools nationwide in preparation for the East African Community. The usage of Swahili in other countries is commonly overstated, being common only in market towns, among returning refugees, or near the borders of Kenya and Tanzania. Even so, Swahili is probably second only to Hausa of West Africa as the sub-Saharan indigenous language with the greatest number of speakers, and Swahili speakers may number some five to ten percent of the 750 million people of sub-Saharan Africa (2005 World Bank Data).[1]

Many of the world's institutions have responded to Swahili's growing prominence. It is one of the languages that feature in world radio stations such as the BBC World Service, Voice of America, Radio Deutsche Welle, Voice of Russia, China Radio International, Radio Sudan, and Radio South Africa.

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Smart
Tetraglot
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United States
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 Message 10 of 16
14 April 2010 at 12:24am | IP Logged 
brian91 wrote:
I was thinking, maybe if I wanted to live in Africa I should learn Swahili? I might start a thread trying to establish a profile on it, like on this website ('chic factor' etc).

Wikipedia wrote:
At the present time, some 90 percent of approximately 39 million Tanzanians speak Swahili.[13] Kenya's population is comparable, but the prevalence of Swahili is lower, though still widespread. Most educated Kenyans are able to communicate fluently in Swahili, since it is a compulsory subject in school from grade one. The five eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (to be subdivided in 2009) are Swahili speaking. Nearly half the 66 million Congolese reportedly speak it;[14] and it is starting to rival Lingala as the most important national language of that country. In Uganda, the Baganda generally don't speak Swahili, but it is in common use among the 25 million people elsewhere in the country, and is currently being implemented in schools nationwide in preparation for the East African Community. The usage of Swahili in other countries is commonly overstated, being common only in market towns, among returning refugees, or near the borders of Kenya and Tanzania. Even so, Swahili is probably second only to Hausa of West Africa as the sub-Saharan indigenous language with the greatest number of speakers, and Swahili speakers may number some five to ten percent of the 750 million people of sub-Saharan Africa (2005 World Bank Data).[1]

Many of the world's institutions have responded to Swahili's growing prominence. It is one of the languages that feature in world radio stations such as the BBC World Service, Voice of America, Radio Deutsche Welle, Voice of Russia, China Radio International, Radio Sudan, and Radio South Africa.


For what I gather, that would be a useful language to learn.
However, reading might be difficult :)
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tracker465
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 Message 11 of 16
14 April 2010 at 12:32am | IP Logged 
brian91 wrote:
tractor wrote:
brian91 wrote:
Would people be bemused if they saw a blonde haired Irish boy speaking Afrikaans?

Aren't many of the Afrikaans speakers blonde?


Yes, but these are usually the people who were/are seen as the oppressors before 1994 with apartheid, so I don't want to offend anybody. :/


Your accent would give you away as being a non-native speaker, and as such, I really doubt that the average person would be offended that you learned Afrikaans.

Thing is though, in Africa there are so many smaller languages, which are spoken as native tongues, though to communicate outside of the tight-knit communities, a lingua franca such as English, French, or Arabic is chosen. I have a friend from Ghana who only speaks English, but then again I have met some Africans at my university who speak three or four different tongues, that I have never even heard of. So at that point it comes to the decision of which language would make a good lingua franca.
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brian91
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 Message 12 of 16
14 April 2010 at 12:44am | IP Logged 
From Anne on Yahoo! Answers:

"You should be able to get along with English.

Swahili is only spoken by certain tribes and even then there are different dialects.

Between the two I would recommend Afrikaans if you would really like to learn another language. Afrikaans is
widely spoken in South Africa and there aren't differnet dialects. Once you can speak Afrikaans you will be able to
understand a lot of Dutch and Flemish as well which wouldn't be much helpful in your visit to Southern Africa but
may be later on."

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Saif
Bilingual Triglot
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 Message 13 of 16
14 April 2010 at 2:24am | IP Logged 
I would learn French instead. Then if you're ambitious, Arabic and Swahili.

Edited by Saif on 14 April 2010 at 2:50am
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Talairan
Tetraglot
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Spain
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Speaks: Afrikaans, English*, Gypsy/Romani, Dutch
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 Message 14 of 16
14 April 2010 at 10:46am | IP Logged 
If you are interested in learning Afrikaans, then learn it :) It will also open up for you the other West (non-High) Germanic languages.
Ethnologue (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=afr) estimates that there are around 5 million first language speakers in Southern Africa and over 10 million second language speakers).
I would take the reponses you get on Yahoo! Answers with a pinch of salt.:) Afrikaans does have dialects: roughly, West Cape, Orange River, and East Cape; and that of the Griquas (Rehoboth Basters) is slightly divergent in pronunciation and vocabulary. All dialects are mutually intelligible.
Swahili is used as a lingua franca over a large part of East Africa (as far north as the Sudan and Ethiopia, west into the Congo, and south to Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique). It is official in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, and all inhabitants are exposed to the language in school. The majority of speakers are therefore not mother-tongue speakers.

I would say, that your choice of language should depend on where you want to live in Africa (it is quite a large place with thousands of languages :) ). To cover all the bases I would say the major ones to learn would be Swahili, Hausa, French, English, Arabic (most likely Hassaniya if south of the Sahara), and possibly Amharic. These would probably enable you to be understood wherever you were in sub-Saharan Africa (and possible North Africa too) (?).
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mick33
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United States
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Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish

 
 Message 15 of 16
14 April 2010 at 6:44pm | IP Logged 
Talairan wrote:
If you are interested in learning Afrikaans, then learn it :) It will also open up for you the other West (non-High) Germanic languages.
Ethnologue (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=afr) estimates that there are around 5 million first language speakers in Southern Africa and over 10 million second language speakers).
I would take the reponses you get on Yahoo! Answers with a pinch of salt.:) Afrikaans does have dialects: roughly, West Cape, Orange River, and East Cape; and that of the Griquas (Rehoboth Basters) is slightly divergent in pronunciation and vocabulary. All dialects are mutually intelligible.
I agree, if you want to learn Afrikaans then do it. I can add from my own experience that learning Afrikaans does make learning Dutch easier as there is a lot of shared vocabulary and Afrikaans word order is closer to Dutch than to English. Another thing to note is that Afrikaans isn't only spoken by white people, it is also often the first language of the Cape Coloureds.
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Johntm
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 Message 16 of 16
14 April 2010 at 10:02pm | IP Logged 
brian91 wrote:
From Anne on Yahoo! Answers:

"You should be able to get along with English.

Swahili is only spoken by certain tribes and even then there are different dialects.

Between the two I would recommend Afrikaans if you would really like to learn another language. Afrikaans is
widely spoken in South Africa and there aren't differnet dialects. Once you can speak Afrikaans you will be able to
understand a lot of Dutch and Flemish as well which wouldn't be much helpful in your visit to Southern Africa but
may be later on."
I wouldn't trust Yahoo! Answers, they get a lot of hilariously crap there.


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