The news agencies, voila
Legend has it that the people of Baynok in southern Senegal were cursed by a tyrant king on his deathbed to live a life of poverty forever. It seems that the Baynouk have already come to terms with the curse of poverty, because their main concern today is precisely the threat of the modern world to their local language. "If we speak our language no one understands us, so when we go to town we speak Diola," said 60-year-old Jacques Sagna, referring to the Diola language most prevalent in this region.
The specific case of Baynok is one of many in Africa, home to a third of the more than 6,000 languages that exist in the world. Linguists say that many African languages are dying because their speakers believe that foreign languages are more useful. To prepare students for the world of business, for example, language departments in West African universities usually teach only in French or English.
The UNESCO organization claims that for these reasons, among others, an average of one language disappears from the world every two weeks. "If you just allow language to die, it's like throwing a Picasso painting down the toilet. A great culture will die with the language," said Roja Blanche, an expert on African languages.
Among the few who are fighting for the lives of the local languages is the Senegalese student Serge Sagna. Sagna returned to his isolated village to learn the Bandial language - one of the languages of the Diola. "It's a language that is doomed to disappear maybe within two generations," Sagna said.
One of the reasons for Sagna's concerns is Senegal's national language, Wolof, which has become one of the "deadly languages" swallowing up others on the continent, such as Hawasa in West and Central Africa or Swahili in the East. About 40% of Senegal's 11 million inhabitants speak Wolof as a mother tongue, and for another 40% it is a second language.
"Wolof has more prestige than our language because it is associated with fashion, with hip-hop," Sagna said. "Intellectuals choose to speak French and those who want to appear cool speak Wolof," said Sagna.
Experts admit that languages like Bandial will never be the property of many, but try to offer solutions to save them. "The first step is the media: there should be more broadcasts in local languages. In places where it was tried, like in northern Ghana, there was a good result," said the language expert Blanch.
Education is another crucial step. According to experts, governments must encourage the use of local languages in schools. This is to improve the data - according to the "Ethnolog" language database - according to which less than 1% of the 10,000 Bandial speakers are literate in their language. And 80% of African languages have no script at all.
The languages in Africa
Africa is home to a third of the more than 6,000 languages in the world. However, the local languages are becoming extinct due to the penetration of the West into the continent, which results in many regions adopting foreign languages
Like English and French, believing that they will bring more benefit. Other reasons for the disappearance of the languages are the small percentages of those who know the languages closely and in writing, and the fact that 80% of the languages in Africa have no writing at all.
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