Quote:
Originally Posted by alee
According to Wikipedia, Afrikaans is one of 11(!) official languages in South Africa. I think that in a lot of former colonies, the colonial power's language ends up being more widely spoken than any one of the often many native languages, so it often ends up as the official language, or at least an official language. That seems to be the case in many former British and French colonies.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I can't off-hand think of any former British colonies which don't still speak English!
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Yeah, but we're talking
official language here. But it may very well be that English endured simply because it was already on the way to become the lingua franca of the world. Also, colonies where multiple native languages were spoken may have been better off having one over-arching language to ease internal communication.
And I'd conveniently forgotten about the English defeating the Boers in South Africa so Afrikaans had already become a secondary language by the time independence came.