Talk:African languages

Is there a role this group could play in proposing some sort of "enhanced African language edition incubation strategy" per a thread on Afrophonewikis? The object would be to have a way of nurturing existing though currently inactive African language editions of Wikipedia. --A12n 17:01, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Strategies for developing African language editions?

The recent proposal for closing the Xhosa Wikipedia has me again thinking of the need for strategies for development of African language editions. The current system is not working - it is not a question of "no one is interested" but more one of who knows about it and what alternative ways there may be for encouraging participation. My thought is that ultimately, funding would probably be needed to support a team to develop relations with language agencies, universities and educational authorities, language teacher groups, individual experts (on this there is not a one-size fits all approach), cultural groups, expatriate groups, etc. In the meantime, can we who are connected with this effort (and the Afrophonewikis group help devise elements of a strategy? --A12n 15:13, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

New request to close Xhosa Wikipedia: Proposals for closing projects/Closure of Xhosa Wikipedia 2. πr² (t • c) 23:08, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

African languages are slow growing

I was looking to the Wikipedias in african languages with >1000 articles. In the last 1 1/2 years they growed between 3 and 33000 articles. The five bigest seems to have agood community and growed about 1–100 articles a day. The others grows very slow: 3, 6, 10, 35, 80 or 150 articles in 20 months. ChiShona growed 300%. Is this sustainable? Why are Wikipedias in african languages still so small (2 > 30 000, 4 > 20 000, 5 > 10 000, 6 1000–9999 articles)? What can we do that Wikipedias in african languages become more attratctif?

In the case of ln:, most native speakers I know tells me, that there is no need, because everyone speak French. This is not true, but a good reason to not participate (in the ln speaking urban area, I could speak with about 30% in French. How is it in rural areas?). --Eruedin (talk) 22:42, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

Africa → So Our continent is going down in mothers language you wannna know why . Sand me a message Zacarias O Celebridade (talk) 15:53, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Wikimedia Indigenous Languages

Good day, I'd like to inform you about the creation of Wikimedia Indigenous Languages, an international body for the coordination of efforts to develop Wikimedia projects in all indigenous projects. You are more than welcome to join and please forward this information to anybody who might be interested. Thanks, Amqui (talk) 20:51, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Closing African language projects

There are currently two open requests for closing African-language projects: Proposals for closing projects/Closure of Amharic Wikiquote 2 (5 mainspace non-redirects), Proposals for closing projects/Closure of Xhosa Wikipedia 2 (146 articles?). It would be better to recruit editors than to close, in my opinion, but I'm just notifying about this. πr² (t • c) 23:06, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

These closure proposals are unfair. The speakers of these languages do exist, they just don't have as much Internet access as Westerners do. Let's be patient; the wikis are not harming anything or draining any resources. "Write something now or we're going to shut you down" is not the correct message to be sending to these small communities. Tempodivalse [talk] 23:11, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

I don't agree with closing the Xhosa Wikipedia, but the Amharic Wikiquote has only 5 mainspace pages (6 if you count a redirect). πr² (t • c) 23:17, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

arabic??

Arabic is an african language that should be add in table arabic is national and official language in Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Comoros, Somalia, Eritrea and Chad which are african countries. Arabic is the largest language of African continent. why it is not in?

Read the first sentence of the page. The intent is not to cover major languages of the world; so Arabic is excluded just like English, French and Portuguese which are also spoken and official in Africa (also Chinese). verdy_p (talk) 07:32, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

Arabic is almost in a category by itself, with regard to Africa. Yes, it is international in a way more similar to other UN languages, but is the first language of many people in Africa (north mainly) in a way that the Europhone official languages (English, French, Portuguese, and also Spanish) are not. I tend to include it in information. Historically speaking, I think one could also put Arabic, Afrikaans, and Malagasy in broad category of long "Africanized" languages (a category that could perhaps be extended with English and French based creoles), meaning that they came with external populations and established themselves before the colonial partition of Africa. In any event, a related, and relatively new issue for Wikimedia projects is Egyptian Arabic - see next section on the latter.--A12n (talk) 11:33, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

List of languages

Northern Sotho (nso) and Egyptian Arabic (arz) should be added to the list in the table. (There is also a question about Arabic, above.) Maltese on the other hand, should be deleted as Malta is generally not considered a part of Africa. I don't recall ever seeing Maltese on any other list or in any survey of African languages.--A12n (talk) 11:39, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Update, January 2016

I updated the table, adding a column with figures for today from Wikistats - All Wikimedia Projects by Size. Many or most numbers increased, but surprisingly, some went down. For the latter I verified with the home pages of the sites for the page counts indicated there. In all cases but one these confirmed (but I have no idea why the decreases, which in some cases were notable). The exception was Setswana, for which the Wikistat page showed a page count of 105 (= ~80% drop), but the Setswana edition indicated a total much more in line with the trend (though still another slight drop). Also, the nso.wikipedia.org (Northern Sotho, which is evidently preferred over Sepedi as a name) has moved out of the incubator. And I added Egyptian Arabic edition (see above), and the Krio incubatee. There may be more updates - will check this further.--A12n (talk) 14:42, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

I've followed up with a number of other additions to the table (data for 2006, 2008, 2013 & 2015; 6 languages beyond Egyptian Arabic and Northern Sotho include Kabyle, Luganda, Oromo, Sango, Swati & Venda) and to the list of incubatees. --A12n (talk) 19:21, 24 January 2016 (UTC)