Tuesday, November 16, 2010

What were those languages?

Since posting my note about the languages used on the Western Australia bus system, TransPerth, I have had a lot of questions from people who didn't recognize several of them.
For those who are interested, here are some details on some of those that may not be familiar to our colleagues in the Western Hemisphere:
Amharic is a Semitic language spoken in North Central Ethiopia.
Dinka is a Nilotic language from Southern Sudan.
Karen is a group of tonal languages spoken by three million people in southern Burma, considered unusual among Tibeto-Burman dialects for not having any Chinese influence.
Kirundi is the Bantu language of 8.7 million Hutu and Tutsi in Burundi, Tanzania, Congo-Kinshasa and Uganda.
Dari is a variety of Persian spoken in Afghanistan.

So what we have here is not only an indication of some of the important groups immigrating to Perth over the centuries, but also in some cases the languages spoken by groups, who when they leave their homeland, march to the nearest ocean, and set sail in a perpendicular course away from the shore, the next significant piece of land they encounter happens to be Western Australia.

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