Loss of Linguistic Diversity in Africa

l Introduction The aim of this article is to provide an assessment of the linguistic diversity that is endangered in Africa. The African continent has a large number of languages , roughly 2000, or, one third of the world's linguistic heritage. At the outset we should state that the Situation of the indigenous languages of Africa is in general healthy, presently and in the immediate future. Most African languages are not on the verge of extinction and many smaller languages, i.e. languages with fewer than 50,000 speakers, are quite stable and do not show reduction in number of speakers. In this respect the African Situation is markedly different from that in Europe and in the Americas. The Ethnologue (Grimes 2000) names 37 African languages that are on the verge of extinction against 161 in the Americas or in percentages: roughly 0.02% of the languages of Africa is in immediate clanger against 1.15% (a percentage that is 60 times higher) of those in the Americas. When we consider every language that has under 10,000 speakers endangered — which seems to be reasonable —, the number for Africa rises to toughly 300. In other respects, too, the African Situation is different from that in the Americas and Australia, where endangered languages are associated with (indigenous) peoples who belong to the "lower" classes of society. This is not generally the case in Africa. A number of African languages are now in a stronger socio-political Situation than they were twenty years ago and these languages have gained ground against the European official languages: Wolof in Senegal, Bambara in Mali, Setswana in Botswana to name a few. Their success is a force against the long term threat of loss of linguistic diversity in a world dominated by English, a perspective that is predicted by some globalists. This does not relieve us from the task of documenting the languages that are endangered. It does, however, have its consequences for the need of linguistic attention to be devoted to the growing languages as well, and in particular when