Diverging Individual Profiles in the Multilingual Societies of Lusophone Africa
Document Type
Paper Presentation
Presenter Language
English
Research Area
Bilingualism and multilingualism
Location
MBSC Council Room 306
Start Date
19-10-2024 10:30 AM
End Date
19-10-2024 11:00 AM
Abstract
While multilingualism may be considered the norm in Africa, different contexts within Africa exhibit very different profiles. The present analysis compares the individual linguistic profiles of participants from three Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa: Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique. Guinea-Bissau, like Cape Verde and São Tomé e Príncipe, uses a Portuguese-lexified creole as a lingua franca (Clements 2022), although unlike these other two countries, it retains many indigenous African languages. Whereas 90.5% of Guinea-Bissau’s population speak the creole, only 33.6% speak Portuguese according to the 2019 census. Neither Angola nor Mozambique have a creole language; however, while Portuguese is spoken by 71.15% of Angolans according to the 2014 census, only 47.3% of Mozambicans speak the language according to the 2017 census. The present study aims to understand the implications of these differences at an individual level.
The data for the present study are taken from a modification of the Bilingual Language Profile (Birdsong et al. 2012) that was administered using QuestionPro as a part of a spoken corpus project that was collected at a university in northeast Brazil where half the seats are reserved for citizens of Lusophone African countries and East Timor. The participants are 22 Angolans, 22 Bissau-Guineans, and 20 Mozambicans. The analysis of the data involves descriptive statistics of characteristics of the participants.
Results indicate that, while only one participant was monolingual, 58.1% of participants reported speaking three or more languages. Mozambique showed the greatest multilingualism (M=3.40; range=2-10) followed by Angola (M=2.95; range=1-5) and Guinea-Bissau (M=2.76; range=2-4). Regarding indigenous languages, the Mozambican participants all speak at least one with 45% speaking two or more. On the other hand, only 71.4% of Angolans speak an indigenous language. While Bissau-Guineans all speak their creole language, only 57.1% speak an indigenous language. The three countries differ in access to international languages other than Portuguese: whereas 76.2% of Angolans report knowledge of such a language, only 35.0% of Mozambicans and 14.3% of Bissau-Guineans do. While multilingualism is the norm among these participants, the 25.8% of participants who do not speak an indigenous language attests to the ongoing language shift toward Portuguese.
References
Birdsong, David, Libby M. Gertken, & Mark Amengual. 2012. Bilingual Language Profile: An easy-to-use instrument to assess bilingualism. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. .
Clements, J. Clancy. 2022. The expansion and evolution of Portuguese. In Salikoko Mufwene & Anna María Escobar (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of language contact: Volume 1: Population movement and language change, 459-504. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Diverging Individual Profiles in the Multilingual Societies of Lusophone Africa
MBSC Council Room 306
While multilingualism may be considered the norm in Africa, different contexts within Africa exhibit very different profiles. The present analysis compares the individual linguistic profiles of participants from three Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa: Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique. Guinea-Bissau, like Cape Verde and São Tomé e Príncipe, uses a Portuguese-lexified creole as a lingua franca (Clements 2022), although unlike these other two countries, it retains many indigenous African languages. Whereas 90.5% of Guinea-Bissau’s population speak the creole, only 33.6% speak Portuguese according to the 2019 census. Neither Angola nor Mozambique have a creole language; however, while Portuguese is spoken by 71.15% of Angolans according to the 2014 census, only 47.3% of Mozambicans speak the language according to the 2017 census. The present study aims to understand the implications of these differences at an individual level.
The data for the present study are taken from a modification of the Bilingual Language Profile (Birdsong et al. 2012) that was administered using QuestionPro as a part of a spoken corpus project that was collected at a university in northeast Brazil where half the seats are reserved for citizens of Lusophone African countries and East Timor. The participants are 22 Angolans, 22 Bissau-Guineans, and 20 Mozambicans. The analysis of the data involves descriptive statistics of characteristics of the participants.
Results indicate that, while only one participant was monolingual, 58.1% of participants reported speaking three or more languages. Mozambique showed the greatest multilingualism (M=3.40; range=2-10) followed by Angola (M=2.95; range=1-5) and Guinea-Bissau (M=2.76; range=2-4). Regarding indigenous languages, the Mozambican participants all speak at least one with 45% speaking two or more. On the other hand, only 71.4% of Angolans speak an indigenous language. While Bissau-Guineans all speak their creole language, only 57.1% speak an indigenous language. The three countries differ in access to international languages other than Portuguese: whereas 76.2% of Angolans report knowledge of such a language, only 35.0% of Mozambicans and 14.3% of Bissau-Guineans do. While multilingualism is the norm among these participants, the 25.8% of participants who do not speak an indigenous language attests to the ongoing language shift toward Portuguese.
References
Birdsong, David, Libby M. Gertken, & Mark Amengual. 2012. Bilingual Language Profile: An easy-to-use instrument to assess bilingualism. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. .
Clements, J. Clancy. 2022. The expansion and evolution of Portuguese. In Salikoko Mufwene & Anna María Escobar (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of language contact: Volume 1: Population movement and language change, 459-504. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.