Language
The national language of Sierra Leone is English. The Krio speak a distinctive language named after their ethnic group. In 1993, there were 473,000 speakers in Sierra Leone (493,470 in all countries); Krio was the third-most spoken language behind Mende (1,480,000) and Themne (1,230,000). Krio speakers lived principally in Freetown communities, on the Peninsula, on the Banana Islands and York Island, and in Bonthe. Speakers in other countries lived in Gambia, Guinea, Senegal, and the United States. Krio is somewhat inter-intelligible with Jamaican Creole and Sea Islands Creole (Gullah). Speakers of Krio as a first language are mainly descendants of former Jamaican slaves. There is a significant linguistic influence from Yoruba.
Read more about this topic: Sierra Leone Creole People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“There’s a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear.”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)
“In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we do not know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)