Languages
According to the Constitutive Act of the African Union, its working languages are Arabic, English, French and Portuguese, and African languages "if possible". A protocol amending the Constitutive Act, adopted in 2003 but as of 2007 not yet in force, added Spanish, Swahili and "any other African language" and termed all six "official" (rather than "working") languages of the African Union. In practice, translation of documents of the AU into the four current working languages which used to cause significant delays and difficulties to the conduct of business, has known a great leap forward since late 2007, when modern translation tools and working methods were introduced.
Founded in 2001 under the auspices of the AU, the African Academy of Languages promotes the usage and perpetuation of African languages among African people. The AU declared 2006 the Year of African Languages.
Read more about this topic: African Union
Other articles related to "languages, language":
... Languages spoken at home primary are of the Visayan languages continuum which contains several different languages sometimes identified as dialects of the same language ... Major languages include Hiligaynon or Ilonggo in much of Western Visayas, Cebuano in Central Visayas, and Waray in Eastern Visayas ... Other dominant languages are Aklanon, Kinaray-a and Capiznon ...
... For example, in most languages written in any variety of the Latin alphabet the dot on a lower-case "i" is not a glyph because it does not convey any ... In Turkish however, it is a glyph, because that language has two distinct versions of the letter "i", with and without a dot ... In general, a diacritic is a glyph, even if (like a cedilla in French, the ogonek in several languages or the stroke on a Polish L) it is "joined up" with the rest of the character ...
... In some languages, aspect and time are very clearly separated, making them much more distinct to their speakers ... There are a number of languages that mark aspect much more saliently than time ... Prominent in this category are Chinese and American Sign Language, which both differentiate many aspects but rely exclusively on optional time-indicating terms to pinpoint an action with ...
... Arabic is the official and national language of the UAE ... Apart from Arabic, English is widely used as a second language ... Other languages spoken in the UAE, due to immigration, include Persian, Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Pashto, Tamil, Bengali and Balochi ...
... Like many Austronesian languages, the verbs of the Philippine languages follow a complex system of affixes in order to express subtle changes in meaning ... However, the verbs in this family of languages are conjugated to express the aspects and not the tenses ... Though many of the Philippine languages do not have a fully codified grammar, most of them follow the verb aspects that are demonstrated by Filipino or Tagalog ...
Famous quotes containing the word languages:
“The less sophisticated of my forbears avoided foreigners at all costs, for the very good reason that, in their circles, speaking in tongues was commonly a prelude to snake handling. The more tolerant among us regarded foreign languages as a kind of speech impediment that could be overcome by willpower.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“Wealth is so much the greatest good that Fortune has to bestow that in the Latin and English languages it has usurped her name.”
—William Lamb Melbourne, 2nd Viscount (1779–1848)
“It is time for dead languages to be quiet.”
—Natalie Clifford Barney (1876–1972)