Aspects of Multilingualism in the Democratic Republic of the Congo - Helena Lopez Palma - 2008-gctid85247

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Aspects of Multilingualism in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Helena Lopez Palma - 2008
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ABSTRACT

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a multilingual country where 214 native languages (Ethnologue) are spoken among circa 68 million inhabitants (2008). The situations derived from the practice of a multilingual mode of communication have had important linguistic effects on the languages in contact. Those have been particularly crucial in the rural areas, where the relations between the individual speakers of different micro linguistic groups have contributed to varied degrees of modification of the grammatical code of the languages. The contact that resulted from migratory movements could also explain why some linguistic features (i.e. logophoricity, Güldemann 2003) are shared by genetically diverse languages spoken across a large macro-area. The coexistence of such a large number of languages in the DRC has important cultural, economical, sanitary and political effects on the life of the Congolese people, who could be crucially affected by the decisions on language policy taken by the Administration.

Introduction


This paper addresses the multilingual situation currently found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The word 'multilingualism' may be used to refer to the linguistic skill of any individual who is able to use with equal competency various different languages in some interlinguistic communicative situation. It may also be used to refer to the linguistic situation of a country where several different languages coexist. Those languages may be used in a monolingual mode of communication among the native speakers of a sociolinguistic group, or as a multilingual mode of communication among the individuals of different linguistic communities.
When used with the second of those meanings, the word 'multilingualism' describes a prominent sociolinguistic characteristic of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country where 214 languages are spoken among 68,008,922 inhabitants (2008)1. But the simultaneous coexistence of a large number of different languages is not only found in the DRC. (...)

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