Africa
Please post your comments and suggestions for this article.
Comment by Neo on June 12th, 2013 at 8:44 am
This map you have of languages is really nonsense. How do you disregard a linguistic community that forms about 60% of the dialects in Southern Africa? Really? you think people in South Africa speak more Afrikaans and English than they speak ZULU? have you ever heard of the Nguni? Do you know Tsonga, Venda? For gods-sake there is a whole freaken country in the middle of South Africa that speaks Seswati and you don’t acknowledge that?
This is a reflection of uneducatedness and gross racism on your researchers, editors and publishers part.
Your encyclopedia SUX!!!
Comment by Jennifer Tanabe on June 12th, 2013 at 9:12 am
Thank you, Neo, for your feedback. However, your criticism of the map of African languages appears a little uninformed. Had you read the article more closely you would realize that the map was primarily showing the four major language families native to Africa. Given that there are at least 2,000 different native languages, a map showing all of them would be impractical.
Referring to Southern Africa, it seems that the map in no way implies that Afrikaans and English are the dominant languages; by contrast, the map is colored orange (the color of the Bantu language group of which Zulu is a part) with Afrikaans and Indo-European written in on top to suggest that they also feature in that area. As the text says, most people speak several languages and many countries have more than one official language, a fact illustrated by the next map in the article.
I am sorry if this particular map upset you. If you are aware of a better map that is available for use, please let us know and we will be happy to use it.
Again, thank you for taking the time to comment, and to help make NWE a valuable information resource.
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