Missing "macrolanguages" of Africa

Screenshot from VOA's Kinyarwanda/Kirundi site

The Voice of America (VOA) recently had a job opening for "International Broadcaster (Multimedia) (Kirundi/Kinyarwanda)." Kirundi and Kinyarwanda are the mother tongues, national languages, and co-official languages in, respectively, Burundi and Rwanda. And they are mutually intelligible, with only minor differences, such that apparently a fluent speaker of either could work on a program serving speakers of both. But there is no term covering both - unless one counts the hyphenated Rwanda-Rundi - and no language coding category to cover material designed for use across the two.

This is a situation encountered with many languages in Africa, and one for which there is at least one potential solution - the neologism and language coding category "macrolanguage." There are actually some macrolanguages defined in Africa, but these are few, and as I discuss below, kind of accidental. Is it time to systematically identify (and code) macrolanguages in Africa?

What defines a language?

For most of us, the distinction between languages seems pretty straightforward. But beyond the most spoken international languages - those used officially by the United Nations or ones you are likely to see on a school curriculum - the situation is often more complex. Sometimes two or more closely related languages are so similar that their speakers can understand each other, but sometimes variations within one language can make understanding difficult. An earlier posting on this blog looked at the notion of "neighbor languages" in Scandinavia and Africa. A broader consideration of these issues by Columbia University's John McWhorter suggests that we're really all speaking dialects, some of which benefit from written forms, and one might add, status, resources, and policy support. There is some truth to the saying that "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."

However, the issues of what to call a "language" and where to draw the boundaries between it and another "language" are still of practical importance for communication (standardization, references, ICT use) and planning (government, business, education). There are two broad approaches in linguistics to doing this, corresponding with the splitter/lumper (or joiner) approaches to categorizing:  one focusing more on distinctions, and the other focusing more on commonalities.

Without going too deeply into that discussion, which gets more complicated when accounting for issues of identity, names, written forms, and national boundaries, suffice it to say that in considering African languages, there are many situations where one encounters the splitter/lumper choice.

The major reference of languages in the world, Ethnologue, takes a more splitter approach, which means that speech varieties that are closely related and interintelligible may be classified as separate languages. It is their estimate of the number of language in Africa (over 2000) that is most commonly cited, but there are other more conservative estimates.A good academic discussion of this issue entitled "How many languages are there in Africa?" was published in 2004 by Jouni Filip Maho (his estimate is under 1500).

What is a "macrolanguage"?

To make the story brief, the term "macrolanguage" is not a term that was used in linguistic description before the inauguration of the  ISO 639-3 system for encoding all languages in the late 2000s. Since that system is based on Ethnologue's "splitter" data, a new category was needed to accommodate existing codes in the earlier less comprehensive parts of ISO 639 (1&2) that in many cases were more "lumper" in approach. The term macrolanguage was in effect a "shim," to borrow someone else's term, to fit the two systems together.

There are by my count 14 macrolanguages listed for Africa (names linked to the Ethnologue macrolanguage pages): Akan; Arabic; Dinka; Fulah; Gbaya; Grebo; Kalenjin; Kanuri; Kongo; Kpelle; Malagasy; Mandingo; Oromo; and Swahili. There could be others.

That brings us back to Kinyarwanda and Kirundi. How is the relationship between them different - more distant - than any of the above established macrolanguages? One difference, as mentioned above, is no common name to make it easy, and another is that they are dominant in different countries - perhaps analogous to the situation of Scandinavian languages?

Another curious situation is that of Mandingo, which includes several western Manding languages, but not Bambara and Jula (Dyula). Even if the latter two were considered too different from the other Manding tongues, they are close enough that one could localize software for the two together. Keep in mind also that the emerging literary standard N'Ko covers all Manding languages (in a different alphabet). Should the Mandingo macrolanguage be extended to include them all?

The four languages of southwestern Uganda - Kiga, Nkore, Nyoro, ajd Tooro - are close enough to be covered by Runyakitara, a proposed (but not encoded) standard which is being used in various ways, including at least some teaching and a localization of the Google interface. Should these four be considered a macrolanguage under perhaps that same name, thus finally providing a code for localization in Runyakitara?

And there are other examples around the continent that could be discussed.

What good would more macrolanguages do?

The first benefit of identifying more macrolanguages would be in language coding - the very environment in which the term was first used. The language of VOA's website for its Kinyarwanda/Kirundi service - www.radiyoyacuvoa.com - is coded as "rw" (Kinyarwanda) since there is no macrolanguage code covering both languages. Likewise, in many cases, the grouping of very close and mutually intelligible languages as a macrolanguage could facilitate localization of software and apps to serve larger populations - and those larger markets could make it more likely that such localization would be pursued and maintained.

Another benefit would be to complement the tendency in language coding towards seeking more granularity, by recognizing natural groupings of languages (for more on this, see a message to the IETF-languages list last May). In effect providing more balance between splitting and lumping/joining.

In the broader picture, identifying macrolanguages could have benefits for policymaking and program development involving languages within macrolanguage groups, by calling attention to the closely related languages. Especially where foreigners are involved, projects may overlook such relationships and the potential resources they may provide. For example materials development for education, and various communication needs might benefit from tapping efforts and resources in closely related languages.

(Minor edits and image added, 2 Sep. 2016)

Ethnologue and the cross-border languages of Africa

Two content features seem to me to detract from the overall quality of Ethnologue - which is the indispensable reference on all the world's languages. One is that pages on cross-border languages - a prominent sociolinguistic feature in Africa - are titled as the language of only one of the countries where they are spoken. The other is that in the current online version, the country pages list "national language," which is a problematic heading, given diverse use of the term, notably in a number of African countries. In this post I will deal with the first of these two items.

A continent traversed by cross-border languages

Due to the way borders in Africa were drawn, a great many of its ethno-linguistic groups are split among two or more of the modern African countries. The languages spoken by such groups can today be called "cross-border languages," and in fact this is the term used by the African Academy of Languages for some of the work it is doing, notably the Vehicular Cross-Border Language Commissions.

Languages that are spoken in more than one country - whether as a first language, which is often the case, or as a vehicular language, which is also frequent - have been a concern of language planning in Africa since independence. The various conferences on African languages that I have cited in some previous posts reflect this concern. Cross border languages were also highlighted by former Malian president Alpha Oumar Konaré, who compared them to "sutures" uniting African countries.*

"A language of" one country, more than one country, or a region?

When one looks up one of these cross-border languages in Ethnologue, however, they are as a rule listed as "a language of" a single country. It bears noting that when borders divide a language community, that community is rarely split in equal parts, so it appears that Ethnologue usually assigns the language to the country where there are more speakers. Other countries, regardless of significance in the language usage, are placed under "Also Spoken In:..."

So, for instance Hausa, the first language of 18.5 million Nigerians (according to Ethnologue, based on a 1991 SIL estimate), but also of about half the much smaller population of Niger, and used across large parts of West Africa (as a lingua franca), is titled simply "... a language of Nigeria." Is Hausa any less a language of Niger, given that the historic home of most Hausas (sometimes called Hausaland) extends well into the latter country? Better "A language of Nigeria and Niger"? Or given the number of other countries where it is "also spoken," maybe Hausa is really "A language of West Africa"?

Another example is the Ewe language, spoken by a population split between southeastern Ghana and southern Togo, which is listed as "... a language of Ghana." Similar to the case with Hausa in Nigeria and Niger, Ewe is spoken by more people in Ghana, but by a larger percentage of the population in Togo. So why not "A language of Ghana and Togo"? The reverse is noted in the case of Southern Sotho, which has more speakers in South Africa, but a higher percentage of population speaking it in Lesotho (it has legal status in both countries) - and is listed as "A language of Lesotho."

Examples abound, among which the major regional language of Swahili is listed as a language of Tanzania (see also discussion of macrolanguages, below).

Ultimately it seems (1) misleading to title pages on cross-border languages as languages of one particular country, and (2) inconsistent the way it is done. Going back to Ethnologue's "Plan of the Site" page, one finds mention of counting "each language only once as belonging to its country of origin" - but what if the area of origin of a language (to the extent one can determine that with any precision) is divided by borders?

Would it not be possible to develop a simple set of criteria by which cross-border languages were given titles  based on the extent (countries) of their major use?

Cross-border macrolanguages

The category of macrolanguage - defined as "multiple, closely related individual languages that are deemed in some usage contexts to be a single language" - takes this issue up another level. Although defined on linguistic criteria, macrolanguages in Africa are even more likely to cross borders, often many borders. There are 14 African macrolanguages by my count, with many of those being cross-border and some really looking like regional languages. Yet all of those are listed as being of one country or another:

• Arabic, "A macrolanguage of Saudi Arabia" (spoken in many countries, including at least 9 in Northern Africa)
• Dinka, "A macrolanguage of South Sudan" (spoken mainly in South Sudan)
• Fulah, "A macrolanguage of Senegal" (spoken in well over a dozen countries, mainly in West Africa)
• Gbaya, "A macrolanguage of Central African Republic" (spoken in CAR and Cameroon)
• Grebo, "A macrolanguage of Liberia" (spoken in Liberia and Ivory Coast)
• Kalenjin, "A macrolanguage of Kenya" (spoken mainly in Kenya, and also in Uganda and Tanzania)
• Kanuri, "A macrolanguage of Nigeria" (spoken in 5 countries of West and Central Africa)
• Kongo, "A macrolanguage of Democratic Republic of Congo" (spoken in DRC, Angola, and Congo)
• Kpelle, "A macrolanguage of Liberia" (spoken in Liberia and Guinea)
• Malagasy, "A macrolanguage of Madagascar" (spoken mainly in Madagascar)
• Mandingo, "A macrolanguage of Guinea" (spoken in 7 countries of West Africa)
• Oromo, "A macrolanguage of Ethiopia" (spoken in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia)
• Swahili, "A macrolanguage of Tanzania" (spoken in at least 9 countries mainly in East Africa, among which some governments have accorded it legal status)
• (Akan is described as "A language of Ghana" in Ethnologue, and is also a macrolanguage in ISO 639-3. Either way it is considered to include Fanti and Twi, and is spoken mainly in Ghana.)

Here again, would it not be possible to adjust certain titles to more accurately convey the range of use? For instance, Fulah as "A macrolanguage of West Africa" and Swahili as "A macrolanguage of East Africa." The macrolanguage items may be easier to modify on a case-by-case basis, as there are fewer of them than languages, and their respective circumstances are somewhat unique. The language entries on the other hand might, as suggested above, need a set of criteria to avoid case by case discussion.

Final thoughts

These observations and suggestions are made in the spirit of helping improve the Ethnologue resource, with a mind particularly to what kind of information that people new to the study of languages of Africa would take away from their initial encounter with it. Cross-border languages exist in all world regions, of course, but perhaps in none more than Africa, where borders were never intended to respect the integrity of ethno-linguistic groups. This category of languages seems to me to merit attention and appropriate revision in how it is presentated.

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* "Les langues nationales transfrontalières doivent être non pas des points limitrophes, des points de démarcation, mais des points de suture entre nos pays."