Im fascinated by how many “living languages” there are in Africa. Are there that many rural living people who speak the same local language in their village? Do most countries have a national language mostly everyone speaks and most people are bilingual? How “living” are these languages? In big cities is it one language mainly or two or three..?
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If you’re a poor villager, it’s not like you’re going to vacation to the other side of the country.
Educated, rich people that have means to travel around know English and / or French.
Most people are to poor to ever leave their village. So they stay somewhat insular and keep small languages alive.
Also Nigeria is huge, omg it’s huge.
Not Africa, but I lived in a country with many languages. Indonesia has over 700 living languages spread out over the 17000+ islands. East to West it’s the size of the US. As part of the nationalism movement and to better unify the country, back in the day the government designated one language (Bahasa Indonesia) as the national language. Bahasa Indonesia is used in government, formal documentation, media, schools, so everyone knows the language from birth so to speak. The other living languages are used in everyday life in the region of that language, so it’s very alive and as long as there is freedom to speak it and a good amount of people that still speak it in the region, it’ll continue to live. Some words may even enter the vocabulary of the national language. For example, in the island of Java, you have Sundanese spoken in west Java, Javanese in the middle and east Java. Move to Bali which is right next to Java, and you have Balinese.
Most people are bilingual or even trilingual or more due to exposure to these living languages. My mother was Javanese, went to college in West Java, and she was a boomer who was middle/upper class during the revolution who regularly interacted with the Dutch colonizers, so she spoke bahasa Indonesia, dutch, sundanese, javanese, and English as that is the international language that every school kid learns as well. Growing up, I spoke bahasa Indonesia, English (having lived in the US), Javanese, Sundanese, and a smattering of Musi (South Sumatera).
Some of these languages are pretty similar to another so it’s easy to understand one language to another, similar to Italian and Spanish.
Multilingualism is much more common than in the US, for one. For two, there’s usually one or at most a few lingua francas, so everyone at least knows their local language and one shared language. Education is often in this shared language, and it’s often English or French.
A large number of languages like this was the norm for pretty much everywhere in history. European countries actively promoted the languages that became French, or Italian, as they moved from decentralized feudal kingdoms to nation-states that were expected to have a single shared culture. Other regional languages or dialects were actively discouraged, and the remnants that haven’t quite died out are still contentious today – look at the Basque region of Spain, the Britons in France, the near-extinction and revivals of the Welsh, Scotch and Cornish languages in Britain. A Nigerian government *could* decide to do the same, and heavily promote everyone only speaking English or Igbo.
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