Hip hop identity in a township reality. - Poppunt

languages, they directly refer to the country where they are spoken. For example:
French is spoken in France, Russian is spoken in Russia, Portuguese is spoken in
Portugal and so on. Of course, this is not applicable for all countries. Lots of African
countries took over the languages of their former colonial rulers, and they also have
many other languages that do not refer to the name of the country. To state that
most people see languages as strongly connected to the unity of a nation, we
performed a small survey. We questioned 23 people (15 females and 8 males)
randomly picked out from a shop in the busy shopping area of Oostende, Belgium.
We asked them about the language(s) people speak in the following countries:
Kenya, Senegal and Congo D.R. It was astounding how many people (11 females
and 6 males) answered the question with ‘Kenyan’/‘Senegalese’/‘Congolese’, or even
‘African’. Few people came up with answers like ‘French’ and ‘English’ (3 females
and 1 male), but also misplaced them. Only one person (male) mentioned Swahili,
another one (female) answered the question with ‘the local languages of the tribes’.
From this survey (which is of course too narrow to be fully representative, but is a
good illustration), we can conclude that a lot of people are unaware of the diversity
of languages and the language use in African countries. But more importantly to us
is the fact that a lot of people see languages and countries/nations as strongly
interconnected with each other. What also becomes apparent is that almost all
respondent’s named only one language per country, apart from 3 people who
mentioned both ‘African’ and ‘Kenyan’/‘Senegalese’/‘Congolese’. ‘African’ was
spoken in all three of the countries according to the respondents, which can
highlight a greater link: the one between a whole continent and a language. This
last thing can maybe be explained by the fact that the African continent still is quite
a mystery to a lot of people. (Only one respondent had ever been to Africa, and that
was on a beach vacation in Djerba, Tunisia.) Africa seems to be a criss-cross of
countries that many outsiders do not know where to locate, with the consequence
that it only consists in their minds as ‘the unit Africa’.
The link between nation and language can also be considered from another angle.
When a nation has more than one language, that nation is then bilingual or
multilingual. Inhabitants of that country are thus unilingual, bilingual or
multilingual, dependent on the linguistic repertoire they have built up during their
lifetime.
The second term, identity and the connection it has with language, is extensively
discussed in the following part of our thesis. Even so, we will touch the subject
briefly here in reference to code-switching. The question many scholars asked