Talk:Languages of Niger

Africa: Niger High‑importance

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Languages

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This is a quick & bare-bones start for the page. The bulleted list is adapted from the fr.wikipedia article on Niger. Also from personal recollection, one usually hears about 8 "national languages" in Niger. Ethnologue is more precise about distinguishing among varieties of these tongues, hence its count is higher. This gets to the heart of discussions about defining & counting languages in Africa. --A12n 01:48, 8 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Developing this article

I just updated the table of national languages. Among other additional info and refinements could be:

Use of languages in the media
Use in schools (including informal use by teachers, even when the language of instruction is French)
Use of national languages in government - I have visited local government centers in the country where it certainly sounded like Hausa or Zarma were being used for some routine business (beyond salutations etc.). French is official, and written reports are in that language, but given the dominance of Hausa and Zarma in different regions, and relative lack of French, it would not be surprising for the national languages to be relied on
National orthographic rules for the country's languages.--A12n (talk) 17:18, 14 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]