Cultural Diversity - The Civil Service

Land Registry Cultural DiversityAfrican LanguagesAfrica is the most linguistically diverse continent in the world with at least 1,000spoken languages; Nigeria alone has more than 400. There are about 20 mainlanguages but they are spoken by only half the people so everybody is used to havingto be multilingual. In addition to English, most people will be able to speak the locallingua franca and their own community language. People may have much moredifficulty reading any of the languages; with such diversity, Africa struggles to produceschool textbooks and mass media in the smaller community languages.There are four main language groups; the two largest are the Niger-Congo and theAfro-Asiatic groups with about 300m and 200m speakers respectively. People whobelong to one of the major groups share a basic vocabulary and construct sentencesin a similar way. There are no guarantees that people within the same group or subgroup will necessarily understand each other but they may be able to conduct a verybasic conversation, in much the same way that the Italians and the Spanish could.Mutual understanding would however be very limited; after all, even though Englishand Dutch are both Indo-European-Germanic languages, the average Brit does notunderstand Afrikaans. It is more likely to happen if there is very close geographicalproximity between the countries of origin of the two native speakers. Difficulties alsoarise because most of the African languages are tonal and different pronunciations ofthe same word have vastly different meanings.The following chart lists some of the most popular languages that are spoken byBlack African communities in the UK. The total number of speakers is the estimatednumber of speakers within the whole of Africa. It includes native and non-nativespeakers.28