Quote:
Originally Posted by Yuri
Neither French or English have the same grip in Africa as Portuguese. In Angola, 50% of population has Portuguese as mother tongue; in the highly urbanized and industrialized South Africa, only 2% of Blacks have Afrikaans or English as mother languages.
In Brazil, Portugal and Angola, 238 million speak Portuguese as mother language.
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You have the typical reasoning of someone who comes from a unilingual country. Most human beings, however, live in multilingual territories (almost all of Africa, the Indian subcontinent, China, etc). In multilingual territories, the mother tongue of an individual doesn't tell much about the languages used by that person. Someone like Mao Zedong had Hunan dialect as his mother tongue (note that the word "dialect" here is not a scientific term, you can as well call it "language", because what's spoken in rural Hunan where Mao grew up is as different from Mandarin Chinese as Romanian is different from Portuguese), but Mao learned Mandarin Chinese later in life, and that's what he used most of the time in his adult life.
It's the same in Africa. Mother language is often a very small language or dialect from the village where the ancestors come from, and people on top of that speak 1 or 2 larger regional or national languages of communication. Oftentimes the "mother tongue" is the least used of the languages known by the individual (mostly to discuss things with close relatives hailing from the same village).
In law school I had a classmate from Conakry in Guinea for instance, and he explained to me how he would talk the language of his family's village (200 km from Conakry) only with relatives from one side of his family (like his grandfather), but he would use Susu (the regional language of the Conakry area) in the street, and French everyday in other contexts. Life in Conakry is essentially mixing Susu and French everyday, depending on context and people talked to, and using the mother tongue (for those coming from outside of Conakry) only with close relatives or for family reunions. But then it's even more complex than that, because in some families, the daughter for some reason will prefer to talk in French with her father, but in Susu with her mother (or vice versa), and in the village dialect (200 km from the capital) with the grandfather, and her brother will prefer to use languages in a different order, etc.
People from monolingual societies cannot comprehend this.
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