Survey of the languages

The number of languages in Mozambique is difficult to state, and there are several reasons for this. The first reason is the low status of the language research, which offers very little written evidence of the languages, both description and literature – this will be treated in more detail in the historic section. The second reason is the difficulty of distinguishing between two languages and two dialects of the same language, which might be a question of definition. A third reason is simply the name, as one language might have different names (e.g. German and Deutsch)

The three most important sources for my investigation of the number of languages are the following:

A. NELIMO (Nucleo de estudos de Línguas Moçambicanas, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Maputo).

NELIMO has analysed the problem in two seminars:

“I Seminário sobre a Ortografia de Línguas Moçambicanas”, 1988 (*b2*).The report from 1989 informs that there are 20 languages, of which 13 are treated in detail.

”II Seminário sobre a Ortografia de Línguas Moçambicanas”, 1999 (*b11*). The report from 2000 informs that there are 17 languages distributed in 6 groups according to their linguistic similarity .

B. National Institute of Statistics. INE (Instituto Nacional de Estatística). (*L8*)

The data from the 2. census have 47 languages, which in the following are distributed in the groups of NELIMO.

www.ethnologue.com , a website, containing a survey of the languages of the world.

Ethnologue informed in 2004 that there were 39 languages in Mozambique, while the 2005 edition informs that there are 43 languages; one language has changed status from language to dialect and 5 new languages have been added

The following table of the languages is arranged according to NELIMO´s 7 groups with data from the different sources.

Survey of the languages: Names and Geography.

Portuguese is the only officila language. Mothertongue for 0,25% of the population and the knowledge of the Portuguese can be seen here:

New Similarities and differences can be illustrated by the some sample words.