Background

In the East African region of Kenya and Tanzania, a complex multilingual situation exists. It comprises nearly 140 indigenous languages, over 100 in Tanzania and about 40 in Kenya, spoken by over 40 million people. These languages belong to four major African language families: Bantu, Nilo-Saharan, Cushitic and Khoisan. The Khoisan family is represented by tiny remnants spoken by a few thousand speakers in central Tanzania. In Tanzania more than 90 per cent of the languages and speakers belong to the Bantu group, a linguistic fact that has made the acceptance of Kiswahili as the national and official language there relatively easier than in Kenya. In Kenya over 75 per cent of the population speak languages belonging to the Bantu family, about 20 per cent speak Nilo-Saharan languages, which include Luo, Maa and Kalenjin, and the rest speak Cushitic languages which include Somali, Oromo and Rendille. These ethnic languages serve as languages of group identity at the subnational level, as Schmied observes in his paper in this volume.

This paper focuses on English in Kenya and Tanzania, which are the subjects of the case study papers in this volume. For discussion of English in other East African countries, see Hancock and Angogo (1984).