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<dls@nwu.edu> Are we speaking of names here or reality? Of the politics of national language policy or the practice (and the politics) of the spread of lingua francae by those who use them? Joining the two, I've long thought that the mutual intelligibility enjoyed by the surely more than 10,000,000 people who speak the dialects and languages included in the following conventional "language" names: Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kiha, KiTongwe, and KiVinza renders these tongues regional ones. And this example could be repeated over and over again in the case of many subgroups of Bantu languages and of Mandenkan, too. This mutual intelligibility is as much a product of a shared, inherited history as it is a result of recent or contemporary multilingualism or "trade relations". Yet, very large areas of Africa's language map do not reflect these sorts of linguistic inheritances. Nigeria is the most obvious case. It might be interesting to consider creating a set of Esperantos for Africa, one for each of Africa's four language families--NigerKordofanian; Afrasian; NiloSaharan; and Khoisan. But, to note these things is to say nothing about promoting or creating regional languages.
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