February is Black Heritage Month in North America. Cudoo supports learning a more complete history of the world, so every week in February Cudoo featured a different African language that is taught on the platform in the Cudoo LinkedIn newsletter. Black Heritage and African language learning are just as important the other eleven months of the year, so all the African languages content appears in this post too.
The four languages covered represent only a very small sample of the thousands of languages spoken in Africa, which features the greatest linguistic diversity of all the continents.
Yoruba
While there are 75 languages with more than a million speakers on the African continent, about 30 million people speak Yoruba (properly Yorùbá) in West Africa. That figure does not include Nigerians, Lagosians, and Gambians living abroad or second generation descendants of the West African diaspora who live and work around the globe.
Many African expats raised their children in Europe, the Middle East and the Americas without any help to teach children their heritage language.
The internet has certainly brought a wealth of resources to help support what many commentators are calling a renaissance of Yoruba language and culture. Unesco commissioned a series of essays that explored African Renaissance and Cultural Issues and included Yoruba among the topics. The essays can be accessed at https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000037500
There are a number of introductory courses to Yoruba on the Cudoo platform. The courses range from a task-specific business vocabulary course to a bundle of courses for those who may travel in West Africa. More information can be found here https://cudoo.com/product-category/languages/yoruba/
Zulu
Celebrating the languages spoken across the African continent is also a celebration of literature, music, and religious diversity. Learning an African language is also an act of cultural affirmation for many Black Americans.
In literature, the name Benedict Wallet Vilakazi is most meaningful to speakers of Zulu. A poet, Vilakazi was one of the most prolific writers to publish in the Zulu language. Zulu is the dominant language in the Zulu Kingdom centered in KwaZulu-Natal. Still, Zulu-speaking people live all over Southern Africa, and it is one of that country’s official languages. About 50% of the population of South Africa understands the language, and it is widely used in day-to-day life and business.
Here’s a primer on the statistics about the Zulu language and culture from @Nehal Amer’s article on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/facts-zulu-culture-language-people-nehal-amer/
The Zulu language learning bundle on Cudoo includes levels 1 to 3. Students who follow the course will learn the systems of pronunciation used in Zulu and vocabulary for tourism and business. https://cudoo.com/products/languages/zulu/the-zulu-language-bundle/
This exploration has spiked everyone’s curiosity here at Cudoo. It’s inspired questions, like, have African languages played a role in the development of contemporary African-American culture? To start exploring the answer, take a look at writer Deborah Harris’ 3-part series on the role of language in African American culture https://blackandbookish.com/blog/the-language-of-african-american-culture-fashion
Amharic
One of the four official languages of Ethiopia, Amharic is also widely spoken in Eritrea and, because the language is sacred to members of the Ethiopian Orthodox church including Rastafarians, it is a popular second language in Jamaica.
While the four dialects and classical form of Amharic have an alphabet of 270 characters, only 40 of those letters are considered to be principle characters for day-to-day speaking and writing of this Semitic language. Amharic is the main language of business and the civil service in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Abba and the central highlands. While English is a school subject in Ethiopia, fewer than 15% of the population is thought to speak English fluently, so learning some Amharic to order food in restaurants, to go shopping and to arrange transportation is a good idea for anyone traveling to Ethiopia.
The Cudoo Course bundle features Amharic levels 1 to 3 along with Amharic for business. It can be found via this link https://cudoo.com/products/languages/amharic/the-amharic-language-bundle/
Swahili
The fourth and final examination of African languages as they are spoken today features Swahili.
Globally, 16 million people speak Swahili as their mother tongue and 82 million people speak it as a second language. It is the most widely-spoken African language and is the common language for meetings and transactions between speakers of other related languages in the Bantu group. This is generally true in Burundi, Rwanda, the northeastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and northwestern Kenya and Tanzania.
In North America, learning Swahili has become one way Black Americans identify with their African roots. According to an article in the Harvard Political Review, this cultural-linguistic connection was made during the Black Power movement.
“As the Black Power movement gained strength in the late 1960s, the language became for the movement’s members a symbol of meaningful black identity,” wrote the article’s author. “The timing was excellently coordinated: just as East Africans themselves were accepting Swahili as both tool and emblem of nationalism, US was offering it a place in America—extending the significance to the swelling Black nationalism in which the organization was engaged.”
The name of holiday Kwanzaa is widely said to come from the Swahili phrase matunda ya kwanza, or first fruits of the harvest.
Interested in learning Swahili? The Cudoo Course bundle features Swahili levels 1 to 3 along with Swahili for business. It can be found via this link https://cudoo.com/products/languages/Swahili/the-Swahili-language-bundle/
Reference: “A Language of Their Own,” Harvard Political Review, April 20, 2015 https://harvardpolitics.com/swahili-language-influence/
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