SomaliNet Forums

they can learn, nothing is hard to learn.
english isnt easier.

dawwa9 wrote:

hyperactive wrote:Arabic and sawahili would make sense for somalis.
even geeljire can write and read quran hince arabic.
learning it would be easier for tehm.

Most Somalis sound like shit in Arabic, they should better just study English. This would give them more global freedom to travel anywhere in the world. With Arabic you are confined to a dozen Arab countries who don't even speak the same dialects.

Swahili is overrated, most Kenyans and Tanzanians who speak it also speak English. So no need to study it. That is like studying Hindi in order to communicate with Indians but 75% of them already speak English (with a funny accent though).

Why should we learn English? The English people should learn af Somali

people forgetting Language carries culture and it makes up another 50% of your identity.


dont get me wrong English is currently good medium for education and i would recommend you all to learn English, but this changes through time, and looking at the lazy ethnic english speakers (british, Americana etc) it would not be a surprise to me that the new medium of education be mandarin or an African language.

those who say Arabic are you guys blind, English took over Academic education from Arabic and it is now entrenching into Religious education.

and in the African case we all know the answer lies in East Africa, but even in East Africa they lack the convenience of homogeneity so the answer is more specifically SOMALIA

snoop12 wrote:dont get me wrong English is currently good medium for education and i would recommend you all to learn English, but this changes through time, and looking at the lazy ethnic english speakers (british, Americana etc) it would not be a surprise to me that the new medium of education be mandarin or an African language.

Never going to happen,

First of all, if you are familiar with the Chinese language you should know that is uses an extremely inefficient writing system. A new character for every word, meaning that in order to understand written Chinese you need to know at least 30,000 characters. This is impractical and would consume a lot of time for a language learner compared to an alphabet system whereby you only need to know 26 ‘characters’ and you are good to go. Spelling properly in English seems like a daunting task for many do you really think those people could handle the tedious Chinese system?

Secondly, the Chinese themselves are heavily focusing on English and in about a decade or two they will surpass the United States in having the most ‘English speakers’.

Lastly, the spread of English was also partially helped because many people around the world already spoke Spanish, French, Portuguese, German etc, such languages are very similar to English and they could easily learn it. While for Chinese it is a totally alien language nobody feels comfortable with, not even the Japanese.

Conclusion: Mandarin Chinese will always remain confined to China/East Asia.

yes im sure the older Generation Somalis would say English is nothing more than cutting the tail of Italian again this serves as a great tool for Somali literature which is part of the Latin family

but you are wrong in the sense that English getting more powerful than it is, this is because people learn English most to educate themselves, not to speak with other people in their home country. You will see that those who have educated themselves using English as a facilitator will translate it into their own language, and if they happen to be sciencetist they will expand the Academic field and record it in their Language first and foremost.

History will eventually repeat itself, ..- Arabic..-English..-.....

two decades ago, European languages were battling and the winner ended up being English with moody French and Spanish second and third

im sure the largest body of Educated people will be found in Africa in the coming decades, have you not noticed how SMART they are , and in the process one or several African Languages will stand out in utilization for Academic purposes.

No language will ever come as close to English at least for a couple of centuries. It is the only language on earth that could help you if you ever got lost in a pygmy village in the Congo, the Sahara desert, Siberia or Antarctica for that matter. Almost everyone on earth knows what ‘Yes’, ‘No’, ‘Where’, ‘Water’ and other Basic English words mean.

About the part that people will never adopt English as their native language, of course not. But slowly these languages are turning into a mini-English, all those thousands of loanwords will eventually lead to mutually intelligible languages in the course of time.