African Countries Speaking English
"African Countries Speaking English" refers to the African nations where English is an official or widely spoken language. These countries include Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, and others. English is often used as a second language in education, government, and business, reflecting the historical influence of British colonization and the global importance of English as a lingua franca.
5 Key excerpts on "African Countries Speaking English"
eBook - ePubInternational English
A Guide to Varieties of English Around the World
- Peter Trudgill, Jean Hannah(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Elsewhere in Africa, English has official status, and is therefore widely used as a second-language lingua franca in Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zambia, Malawi and Uganda. It is also extremely widely used in education and for governmental purposes in Tanzania and Kenya. In the Indian Ocean, Asian and Pacific Ocean areas, English is an official language in Mauritius, the Seychelles, Pakistan, India, Singapore, Brunei, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Western Samoa, American Samoa, the Cook Islands, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Guam and elsewhere in American-administered Micronesia. It is also very widely used as a second language in Malaysia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Nepal and Nauru. (In India and Sri Lanka, there are also Eurasian native speakers of English.) In many of these areas, English has become or is becoming indigenized. This means that these second-language varieties of English, as a result of widespread and frequent use, have acquired or are acquiring relatively consistent, fixed local norms of usage which are adhered to by all speakers. These varieties of English may differ, often considerably, from the English of native speakers elsewhere in the world, mainly as a result of influence from local languages. Thus native speakers of English may sometimes have some difficulty in understanding these non-native varieties. This is something of a problem, but it is not clear what should be done about it. If, for example, certain features of West African English (WAfEng) make that variety easier and better than EngEng for West Africans to learn and use, then does it matter that British people find WAfEng difficult to understand? After all, Americans may find ScotEng difficult to understand, but no one would seriously suggest that this is a reason for changing ScotEng...
eBook - ePubInternational English
A guide to the varieties of Standard English
- Peter Trudgill, Jean Hannah(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Elsewhere in Africa, English has official status, and is therefore widely used as a second language lingua franca in Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zambia, Malawi and Uganda. It is also extremely widely used in education and for governmental purposes in Tanzania and Kenya. In the Indian Ocean, Asian, and Pacific Ocean areas, English is an official language in Mauritius, the Seychelles, Pakistan, India, Singapore, Brunei, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Western Samoa, American Samoa, the Cook Islands, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Guam and elsewhere in American-administered Micronesia. It is also very widely used as a second language in Malaysia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Nepal and Nauru. (In India and Sri Lanka, there are also Eurasian native speakers of English.) In many of these areas, English has become or is becoming indigenized. This means that these second language varieties of English, as a result of widespread and frequent use, have acquired or are acquiring relatively consistent, fixed local norms of usage which are adhered to by all speakers. These varieties of English may differ, often considerably, from the English of native speakers elsewhere in the world, mainly as a result of influence from local languages. Thus native speakers of English may sometimes have some difficulty in understanding these non-native varieties. This is something of a problem, but it is not clear what should be done about it. If, for example, certain features of West African English (WAfEng) make that variety easier and better than EngEng for West Africans to learn and use, then does it matter that British people find WAfEng difficult to understand? After all, Americans may find ScotEng difficult to understand, but no one would seriously suggest that this is a reason for changing ScotEng...
eBook - ePubThe Ambiguity of English as a Lingua Franca
Politics of Language in South Africa
- Stephanie Rudwick(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Such English second language identities (Block 2014) are communicated in English lingua franca contexts and they deserve nuanced analysis. African people have invested in English and actively employ the language as a resource to communicate and to ‘be in the world’. English does form part of their identities, but this did and does not always happen by choice. It takes place because of South Africa’s colonial past and the simple fact that non-black South Africans have failed to learn African languages. For the most part South Africa’s multilingualism involves the speakers of Bantu languages, the majority of white, Indian and coloured people are, at most, bilingual (Census 2011). Reorientation towards Multilingualism English lingua franca environments are inherently socio-linguistic diverse and also offer great potential for research on multilingualism (House 2003 ; Jenkins 2015 ; Cogo 2018 ; Smit 2018). This is particularly important given that the criticism of English in Africa is often built around abstract but very emotional concerns that local languages will be swept away in a wave of ‘westernization’ (Banda 2009). For English to have lingua franca status in Africa presupposes its coexistence with African languages and Afrikaans. And this is precisely what has happened for centuries. There is great natural potential for multiple languages to coexist next to each other in diverse ways, albeit often within a hierarchical order and diglossic relations that place English either implicitly or explicitly at the top. After all, multilingualism has long been “a fact of African life” and, by extension, Africa’s primary lingua franca (Fardon & Furniss 1994 : 4). Complex dynamics have generated multiple forms of more or less habitualized multilingual practice...
eBook - ePubCode-Switching as a Pedagogical Tool in Bilingual Classrooms
Insights from a Secondary STEM Classroom in Zimbabwe
- Miriam Chitiga(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In postcolonial nations, South Africa included, educational language concerns have their roots in liberation philosophies and histories. For example, the 1976 Soweto Uprising, which was meant to protest a variety of discriminatory educational policies of Apartheid South Africa, targeted the unjust policies surrounding the imposition of Afrikaans as a language of instruction for Black secondary school children (Oakes, 1988). As recently as 2019 in the United States, a Duke University professor and director of a graduate science program, after a discussion with two of her colleagues, wrote a mass email to students warning Chinese students to desist from speaking Chinese in the biostatistics building, a practice that her colleagues had characterized as “being so impolite as to have a conversation that not everyone on the floor could understand.” She begged international students to “to commit to using English 100% of the time when in Hock or any other professional setting,” to avoid “unintended consequences” (Wang, 2019). Ironically, studies show that more international students are drawn to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects due to linguistic-related learning capacities. In a recent study of immigrants’ academic discipline choices, Rangel and Shi (2019) found that “immigrant children accumulate skills in ways that reinforce comparative advantages in nonlanguage intensive skills such as mathematics and science, and this contributes to their growing numbers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers” (p. 484)...
eBook - ePub- Raymond Hickey, Raymond Hickey(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...This would of course imply a great deal of contact over a widespread area likely for an extended period of time. That such a question has been raised so many times points again to the lumping tradition in African linguistic studies. It also suggests that contact might be just as important if not more important than genetic inheritance for understanding the structures and relatedness of African languages. A recent paper answers this question with a qualified “yes” using quantitative measures (Heine & Leyew 2008). A paper in the same volume divides Africa into five areas on the basis of phonological features (Clements & Rialland 2008) and another recognizes a core area in the central Sudan (Güldemann 2008). A final paper examines the many claims for Ethiopia as a linguistic area, and concludes that indeed these early scholars were correct (Crass & Meyer 2008). Thus Africa has at least one agreed-upon linguistic area and several other proposals for linguistic areas. A claim for Africa itself as a linguistic area, however qualified, is difficult to assess. The relatively recent expansion of Niger-Congo and especially Bantu, has led to the phylum’s overweening influence on languages from other phyla with which it has been in contact. The spread of Bantu is undoubtedly one of the most momentous migrations in the (known) history of Africa. Its linguistic repercussions have been great, causing the disappearance of many languages and the creation of others. Another major force at work has been the rise of Sudanic empires and the spread of Islam...
