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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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.
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