German in Namibia and Arabic in Central Asia.. Global languages ​​spoken by tongues far from their homelands

Languages ​​do not know borders, and they move across countries and continents of the world as symbols, signs and tools of knowledge, and because they are the most important means of thinking, communication and understanding between humans, they have historically found many tongues outside their places of origin and even in places very far from their birthplace.

This report reviews a number of these languages ​​that have moved away from their original places, as their speakers carried them with them, preserved them and bequeathed them to their children, while other languages ​​disappeared outside their natural habitats and dissolved in new cultures.

Welsh in Argentina

In Argentina, the far southwest of the world, some residents speak Welsh, as it is still an official language alongside English, while in Argentine Patagonia it is spoken by about 10% of the population who are descended from immigrants who came in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Welsh brought their tea culture to Argentine Patagonia (Shutterstock)

The Welsh colony expanded in Argentine Patagonia since the arrival of Welsh immigrants starting in 1865 and extended all the way to the Andes, the keenness of the first inhabitants and subsequent generations to preserve their language and culture in a Spanish-speaking community.

German in Kazakhstan

In 1762, the German Princess Catherine II seized the throne of the Russian Empire after the coup and assassination of her husband, the Russian Emperor Peter III. The princess called on Europeans to emigrate and become Russian subjects and cultivate Russian lands, while preserving their language and culture.

As a result, a number of Germans settled on the banks of the Volga River since the 18th century and were allowed to preserve their culture, language, traditions and churches, but at the end of the 19th century the Russian Empire began implementing a policy of integration, which affected their culture, and during the Soviet era in the 20th century, many of them left the Republic Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic to the Republic of Kazakhstan, with pressures for forced cultural integration into Russian culture, especially during the reign of Joseph Stalin and the time of World War II.

Despite successive migrations, the Kazakh Germans still constitute a minority in the country and most of them live today in the northeastern part of the country between the cities of Nur-Sultan and Oskman, and their number was about one million people at the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and now they constitute more than 170 thousand of the country’s population.

German in Southwest Africa

And in 1880, Germany colonized African regions that are now among the countries of Cameroon, Togo and Namibia, and the German language has an official status in the Namibian society (southwest Africa), especially in the center and south of the country, and until 1990 it was one of the 3 official languages ​​in what was then Southwest Africa, along with Afrikaans and English also categorized into the Germanic language family.

German is the mother tongue of about 30,000 Namibians, in addition to the older Black Namibian Germans and Namibians who grew up as children in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

French in India

The French in India are a relic of the French presence there, which began in 1673 with the founding of the French East India Company, and lasted until 1962 when "French installations" officially returned to India.

The French presence was always insignificant compared to the British presence, and the French in India were generally not a large part of the population.

Buildings of the East India Company in Pondicherry, India, late 18th century (networking sites)

A small minority of India's citizens are of French origin dating back to the time of the former French settlers and colonists who settled in India since the 17th century, and Pondicherry still has a community of French people living in the city, and French is also an official language in the southern Indian state.

However, Indic French differs greatly from Standard French in pronunciation and dialect, and has many unique words.

Arabic outside its countries

From the Arabian Peninsula came the ancient Arabs and settled in India, Central Asia, the Iberian Peninsula, and of course in the Arab Mashreq and North Africa.

The Arabic language was part of what the men of the desert carried to Europe, Asia and Africa alike. Before the Islamic conquest, this sublime tongue was a rich language of poetry in a barren land in which an enormous vocabulary developed and made many words for the desert Arabs and a huge stock of vocabulary with which it is not difficult to express, and did not confront Poets have no problem in using metaphors and rhetorical expressions.

There are Arabs and Arabic speakers currently in Arab-majority cities in different parts of the continents of Asia and Africa, and in countries neighboring the Arab world such as Turkey, Iran, countries in sub-Saharan Africa, East and Central Asia and others.

By the tenth century AD, the Arabs established commercial settlements on the eastern coast of Africa with the support of the Sultanate of Muscat, and they mixed with the inhabitants of these areas, so Arab-African societies were established and the Swahili language and culture developed as a result of that mixing.

In the Nile Valley, African Arab societies were also established as a result of the intermarriage of Arabs with Africans from the regions of Sudan and the countries of the Nile. In the mid-19th century, Arab traders who worked in the ivory trade in Central Africa mixed with the inhabitants of the Saharan regions.

The city of Harar in eastern Ethiopia is the largest Ethiopian city that includes Arabs among its residents, although they are not a majority, and there is also an Arab minority in the Muslim-majority Ogaden region (disputed between Ethiopia and Somalia).

Arabic is the most widely spoken language in Chad, and it is an official language spoken by the president of the country fluently. There are more than 120 local dialects spoken in the country, but the constitution recognizes only Arabic and French as official languages.

The Chadian dialect is spoken by more than one million people in Chad, and is also spoken by minorities in Cameroon, Nigeria, Niger, Central Africa and South Sudan.

There are about 12% of the Arabic-speaking population in Senegal and a smaller percentage in Mali, Niger and Nigeria, and they do not constitute a majority in any of the regions and cities of these countries.

The Arab presence in Persia did not begin with the Islamic conquest in 633 AD. For centuries, the Persian rulers were in contact with their Arab neighbors, especially in the northern and southern regions of the Arabian Peninsula. Arab tribes later settled in different parts of the Iranian plateau.

Dialects derived from Arabic spread in Central Asia, including the Bukhari dialects (spoken by more than 3,000 people), Qashqadari, which are spoken in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and Khorasani Arabic, which is spoken by more than 5,000 people in eastern Iran, and the Afghan Arabic dialect in Afghanistan. Most of these dialects branched off from the Iraqi dialects during the Abbasid era, as the Arabs settled in cities such as Balkh, Nishapur and others.

The Arabs of Iran also speak dialects close to the Euphrates dialect, which is similar to the dialect of Mosul and the Arabs of Anatolia as well.

Anatolian Arabs are found in different regions of present-day southern, central and southeastern Turkey, and their presence there is relatively old. The Arabs of Turkey are distributed in the regions of Antioch, Adana, Mardin, Gaziantep, Mersin, Urfa and others.