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Atlas of the world's languages in danger

Colectividad autor : UNESCO [68365]

Persona autor : Moseley, Christopher [editor] [18], Nicolas,
Alexandre [cartographer] [7]
ISBN : 978-92-3-104096-2 (corr.), 978-92-3-104095-5
Recopilación : (1 v. in various pagings), maps + 1 poster
Idioma : inglés
También disponible en :  Français,  Español
Año de publicación : 2010
Tipo de licencia :  CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO [12553]
Tipo de documento : libro

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32

Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger


Language endangerment in Sudan1
Sudan has been the scene of what is often considered the world’s
longest civil war. It has also hosted one the world’s largest humanitarian
operations, Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS). While the 2005
Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) has brought stability and the
beginning of reconstruction in the South, Darfur is in turmoil. With 1.5
million deaths in the South, 4 million internally displaced persons (IDPs)
and 500,000 refugees, the entire Southern Sudanese population has
been deeply affected by the conflict.
This situation increases language endangerment in a number of
ways. Displacement has occurred in a variety of patterns (long-distance,
repeated displacement) that may magnify the rate of endangerment.
As IDPs are dispersed throughout the country, they typically acquire
the language of the host communities and at the same time reduce the
use of their own language. IDP camps usually bring together people
from many different communities, and new forms of communication are
developed that may involve multilingualism but also creolization. In the
case of repeated displacement, IDPs do not always seek shelter among
the same hosts and may therefore acquire yet more languages. While
multilingualism and creolization do not necessarily affect adults, children
may not adequately acquire their mother tongue. This is especially likely
in cases of protracted displacement. In northern cities such as Khartoum,
there may be a tendency for children to use Arabic more than their
mother tongue.
For a whole decade, between 1989 and 1999, part of the Nuba
mountains in South Kordofan was isolated from the rest of the world by
a Sudanese Government blockade. The humanitarian situation was very
poor, but paradoxically, this isolation may have reduced the degree of
endangerment of the Nuba languages. Two factors have contributed
to this, both in the South and in the Nuba mountains. First, the conflict
has severely interrupted children’s schooling. This has, of course, had
negative effects on their education, but since the schooling would
have been in Arabic, the state-supported language, the interruption
has also slowed down the threat of Arabic overwhelming local cultures
and languages. Second, when the education system was restarted by
the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in 1996, all schooling was in
English, a language that posed no threat to Nuba languages. The vitality
of these languages was apparent during a visit to the Nuba mountains
(Heiban, Nagorban, Dilling) in 1999, at the height of the blockade
(UNCERO, 1999). The situation in the area under government control
may be different, especially with the prevalence of Arabic and the large
variety of languages spoken in the IDP settlements and the so-called
peace camps or peace villages.
It has not been possible to assess the real degree of
endangerment of Sudanese languages, owing both to the sheer
numbers involved (134 according to the Ethnologue) and the
protracted conflict. Furthermore, the returnees after the 2005 CPA
make the situation more complex and the data harder to collect. A
fraction of these languages (just over thirty) have been reported in this
chapter with varying degrees of endangerment. Once the stabilization
of Southern Sudan (including the Nuba mountains) is confirmed and
reconstruction well under way, the new authorities of Southern Sudan
may include linguistic data in their censuses and a better picture of

30 1. Sudan sits on the linguistic map in both northern and sub-Saharan Africa.
For more details, see the chapter on sub-Saharan Africa in this Atlas.
the linguistic situation and the level of endangerment may then be
possible.

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