After nearly two years, a new entry in the series approaches :D
I will try to summarise what I remembered, although I have many caveats to explain.
Like the Asian languages quiz, this quiz has some subjectivity, and I typically went for languages which are recognised by their government, especially as a national language. Few languages are recognised by regional governments in African nations.
I was met with a dilemma over languages like Swahili, which are spoken as lingua francas over a large area, primarily as a second language. Ultimately, I was lenient with the areas highlighted in the equatorial African regions (this is why the Central African Republic maintains its border shape for example). I was a little more restrictive with the European languages, and I mainly kept their borders to their respective cities.
Speaking of which, a big problem I faced was the question of the Creole languages. Should a Creole language, and its total of native speakers, count towards the language it is based off of or not? I generally maintained a policy of keeping them separate but it is very arbitrary especially in a dichotomy society in which, say, Mauritian Creole language is the informal language and French is the more formal language. My decision to include Afrikaans as a Creole language may also be controversial, as it is famously taught as a 'faughter language of Dutch', but I couldn't find a good reason why it wasn't one.
Additionally, I wanted to add hidden dots to help people more easily spot some of the smaller languages, but unfortunately I am out of time and I thought it better to publish the quiz as is.
JIAOZIRA STRIKES AGAIN! I became familiar with most of these names last summer working on a now abandoned project, so this was quite nostalgic and also made me focus the hardest I ever have on quiz, trying to retrieve memories from then lol
Can you accept Dangbe for Dangme? And I think Kimbundu and Umbundu are swapped.
Also, if you ever need a blog idea, you could go over ways to remember the languages in these quizzes, not just through mnemonics but through interesting things, this could especially be important for African languages which are so underappreciated. Amazing quiz again!
Thanks for playing! I'm glad to see someone else who is now familiar with these languages. This quiz was intimidating to make after the Asian languages quiz, which was by far my biggest project on Jetpunk, but I'm glad I took the plunge and made it :D
I made the changed by the way. These languages really are quite interesting and special, so I could see a blog entry featuring a number of them as something that people would enjoy. I already have graphics in the form of the flag designs after all.
Language status is certainly key, it makes for a fun mix between big languages and small ones. However, certain countries have either very limited recognition of their minority languages, or they recognise virtually every language spoken in the country (and therefore I didn't consider them). There is more subjectivity in this quiz, as I didn't look at any legal documents for example and sources like Wikipedia are unfortunately hardly trustworthy.
As for Kenya, they only recognise Swahili, to the best of my knowledge.
Great job Jiaozira! As I expected when I started the quiz, I didn't get many--so many very obscure languages on here--but it was still a joy to try to guess them all, and as always it's fun seeing the relationships between languages and their families.
Truth be told, while there are some languages like Bambara and Chewa which are rarely known for holding the seats of power in their respective countries, there are still a great number of languages you could only get if you were very familiar with one of these countries (like the Senegalese languages).
I love these grandious quizzes based on official-ish status (rather than size for example), because when I'm making them I think to myself there's simply no way anyone is guessing the Noon language, hahaha.
Broadly I agree with the Quizmaster and Stewart's decision to limit nominations to more concise quizzes, but it is a shame with a quiz like this which is a continuation of a series.
In any case, when I get around to Oceania and the Americas both quizzes should be nominateable due to low answer counts. Thanks for playing :)
Personally, my favourite quizzes are medium to long quizzes which push the limits of my knowledge be the answers cities, languages, regions etc.
However, I could see that the top nominated quizzes became very centred around historical map quizzes with hundreds of answers. These quizzes were certainly high effort, but they were best appreciated by a small subset of Jetpunk users, so I can see why Quizmaster and Stewart were looking to broaden the kinds of quizzes which reach the main page.
It's certainly not perfect. Personally, I wish that we could have more Quizmaster-selected quizzes getting featured like in pre-nomination Jetpunk, but now we are typically seeing one quiz featured from the nomination board each week. I can see why it is a discouraging quiz, but the ability to spotlight the longer quizzes really mitigates most of the disappointment.
The nominations board is extremely congested after a couple years and it is very difficult to get a quiz at the top, anyways.
It is an interesting language I had no idea about until today, in fact it is neat to learn that people live on these islands. However the language is not recognised by Eritrea in any way.
The Afrikaans issue is interesting. I've heard it said (I daresay you know more about this than I do!) that Afrikaans isn't a creole because it's too complex and too irregular. For example, I have read that all creoles are thoroughgoing subject-verb-object languages, whereas Afrikaans is subject-object-verb in subordinate clauses, like German or standard Dutch. And although it's pretty regular compared to most European languages, it still have lots of weird vagaries - for example, how you produce a plural noun is still a mystery to me, despite having spoken the language daily for several years now.
On the other hand if you believe the definition of a Creole on Wikipedia, it's so wide that Afrikaans is definitely one. But then so is English. So um...
Admittedly I don't have a great answer as to the exact meaning of what a Creole language is. The best description I could find was that it arises as a pidgin language which becomes adopted by a population, usually accompanied by grammatical simplification. In this case, I believe Afrikaans is only partially Creolised. All sources I could find on Afrikaans went back and forth on whether or not it was a Creole language or merely a daughter language of Dutch which developed parallel to Modern Dutch. As far as I could tell, the simplification of grammar was the only unified trait of Creole languages, as they arise from a very diverse set of parent languages, although the irregularity factor has also been used to explain why English isn't a Creole language.
It's a very interesting topic and I hope I am not speaking incorrectly in my answer, as I am still a layman in these topics.
I would tend to allow type-ins a bit more leniently on a quiz of this type, for example accepting Acholi for Southern Luo, or Tigray for Tigre/Tigrayit, or Ibibio for Efik. I am sure there are other examples also, but these ones came to mind.
Mostly this is just because it's often unclear whether a certain language is included as wide-spoken/official "enough". So rather than trying out alternate spellings or broader/narrower specifics, it's easy to assume "I guess that language didn't make the cut" and move on.
Thank you for your type-in suggestions, I added them to the quiz.
I certainly want to be lenient where I can, I tried to get all the common names I could find on Wikipedia, but Wikipedia isn't the greatest source for alternative names in particular.
OMG ! I've been waiting for this for so long, thank you for making this !
I mean... I sucked big time (I got like... 76 out of 152 lol) but I would've had 79 if I knew the only answers you accepted for Kabuverdianu, Kiriol and Krio were "Cape Verdean Creole", "Guinea-Bissau Creole" and "Sierra Leonean Criole" (dunno if it's a typo, but that's how you spelled it), lol.
Anyway. No pressure, just curious, are you planning on making one about the Americas ? I know it's a lot harder to do this with NorAm but Central & South American still have native populations who speak their language and many of their governments recognize them, so I was wondering if that's something you were planning on or interested in making :)
Thanks for playing! This was a highly demanded quiz, relatively speaking, and I am happy I could finally deliver :)
Kabuverdianu will now work, I had to require the specific place-names for the Creole languages, since there are so many languages called by a version of the word 'Creole'. This was a difficult decision, since colloquially everyone will call it 'Krio', not Sierra Leonean Creole.
So far I have North America down and South America in the works (slowly). My biggest problem with the Americas is the inconsistent recognition of Indigenous languages, some territories recognise no languages at all and others recognise virtually every language. This is a problem with every continent but it's most pronounced in the Americas. Regardless, it's a fun series and I can't wait to finish it off soon!
- If you're going to include Malta, Socotra, and European island territories, then Maltese and Reunion Creole should be included.
- "Idoma" doesn't show up on the map despite being an answer.
- "Krio" should be accepted for Sierra Leonean Creole. No one calls it by the full name.
- "Tamasheq" should not be separated from "Tamazight" if Kabyle, Tashlhiyt etc. are not also separated. The "Tamasheq" area on the map actually includes several non-Tamasheq languages such as Tahaggart and Tawellemmet.
- If creoles and unofficial lingua francas are included, then Kamtok/Cameroonian Pidgin should be included. Gikuyu, Luhya, and Kamba in Kenya have no official status but have millions of speakers and serve as local lingua francas.
- Beja with ~3 milliion speakers is a recognized minority language in Sudan and Eritrea and should probably be included.
- Tshwa is generally regarded as a Khoe language like Khoekhoe, not a separate family.
Great quiz! I got 62 on my first try, still a ways to go... In general, I understand the choices you made and subjectivity. But, one thing I would say is there are a few creole languages that definitely could've been included - like Nigerian Pidgin and Liberian Kreyol.
I will try to summarise what I remembered, although I have many caveats to explain.
Like the Asian languages quiz, this quiz has some subjectivity, and I typically went for languages which are recognised by their government, especially as a national language. Few languages are recognised by regional governments in African nations.
I was met with a dilemma over languages like Swahili, which are spoken as lingua francas over a large area, primarily as a second language. Ultimately, I was lenient with the areas highlighted in the equatorial African regions (this is why the Central African Republic maintains its border shape for example). I was a little more restrictive with the European languages, and I mainly kept their borders to their respective cities.
Additionally, I wanted to add hidden dots to help people more easily spot some of the smaller languages, but unfortunately I am out of time and I thought it better to publish the quiz as is.
I hope you enjoy! :)
Can you accept Dangbe for Dangme? And I think Kimbundu and Umbundu are swapped.
Also, if you ever need a blog idea, you could go over ways to remember the languages in these quizzes, not just through mnemonics but through interesting things, this could especially be important for African languages which are so underappreciated. Amazing quiz again!
I made the changed by the way. These languages really are quite interesting and special, so I could see a blog entry featuring a number of them as something that people would enjoy. I already have graphics in the form of the flag designs after all.
I was surprised not to see some languages like Kikuyu (6.6 mil), but I guess this quiz is based mainly on language status, not number of speakers.
Language status is certainly key, it makes for a fun mix between big languages and small ones. However, certain countries have either very limited recognition of their minority languages, or they recognise virtually every language spoken in the country (and therefore I didn't consider them). There is more subjectivity in this quiz, as I didn't look at any legal documents for example and sources like Wikipedia are unfortunately hardly trustworthy.
As for Kenya, they only recognise Swahili, to the best of my knowledge.
Truth be told, while there are some languages like Bambara and Chewa which are rarely known for holding the seats of power in their respective countries, there are still a great number of languages you could only get if you were very familiar with one of these countries (like the Senegalese languages).
I love these grandious quizzes based on official-ish status (rather than size for example), because when I'm making them I think to myself there's simply no way anyone is guessing the Noon language, hahaha.
Niger/Nigeria
Nigeria/Benin
Nigeria/Chad
Ethiopia/Sudan
Namibia/Zambia
A section of the Zambia/Zimbabwe border
Sections of the Sudan/South Sudan border
In any case, when I get around to Oceania and the Americas both quizzes should be nominateable due to low answer counts. Thanks for playing :)
However, I could see that the top nominated quizzes became very centred around historical map quizzes with hundreds of answers. These quizzes were certainly high effort, but they were best appreciated by a small subset of Jetpunk users, so I can see why Quizmaster and Stewart were looking to broaden the kinds of quizzes which reach the main page.
It's certainly not perfect. Personally, I wish that we could have more Quizmaster-selected quizzes getting featured like in pre-nomination Jetpunk, but now we are typically seeing one quiz featured from the nomination board each week. I can see why it is a discouraging quiz, but the ability to spotlight the longer quizzes really mitigates most of the disappointment.
The nominations board is extremely congested after a couple years and it is very difficult to get a quiz at the top, anyways.
On the other hand if you believe the definition of a Creole on Wikipedia, it's so wide that Afrikaans is definitely one. But then so is English. So um...
It's a very interesting topic and I hope I am not speaking incorrectly in my answer, as I am still a layman in these topics.
Mostly this is just because it's often unclear whether a certain language is included as wide-spoken/official "enough". So rather than trying out alternate spellings or broader/narrower specifics, it's easy to assume "I guess that language didn't make the cut" and move on.
Overall an excellent quiz.
I certainly want to be lenient where I can, I tried to get all the common names I could find on Wikipedia, but Wikipedia isn't the greatest source for alternative names in particular.
I mean... I sucked big time (I got like... 76 out of 152 lol) but I would've had 79 if I knew the only answers you accepted for Kabuverdianu, Kiriol and Krio were "Cape Verdean Creole", "Guinea-Bissau Creole" and "Sierra Leonean Criole" (dunno if it's a typo, but that's how you spelled it), lol.
Anyway. No pressure, just curious, are you planning on making one about the Americas ? I know it's a lot harder to do this with NorAm but Central & South American still have native populations who speak their language and many of their governments recognize them, so I was wondering if that's something you were planning on or interested in making :)
Kabuverdianu will now work, I had to require the specific place-names for the Creole languages, since there are so many languages called by a version of the word 'Creole'. This was a difficult decision, since colloquially everyone will call it 'Krio', not Sierra Leonean Creole.
So far I have North America down and South America in the works (slowly). My biggest problem with the Americas is the inconsistent recognition of Indigenous languages, some territories recognise no languages at all and others recognise virtually every language. This is a problem with every continent but it's most pronounced in the Americas. Regardless, it's a fun series and I can't wait to finish it off soon!
Also can you accept Krio for Sierra Leonean Creole?
- If you're going to include Malta, Socotra, and European island territories, then Maltese and Reunion Creole should be included.
- "Idoma" doesn't show up on the map despite being an answer.
- "Krio" should be accepted for Sierra Leonean Creole. No one calls it by the full name.
- "Tamasheq" should not be separated from "Tamazight" if Kabyle, Tashlhiyt etc. are not also separated. The "Tamasheq" area on the map actually includes several non-Tamasheq languages such as Tahaggart and Tawellemmet.
- If creoles and unofficial lingua francas are included, then Kamtok/Cameroonian Pidgin should be included. Gikuyu, Luhya, and Kamba in Kenya have no official status but have millions of speakers and serve as local lingua francas.
- Beja with ~3 milliion speakers is a recognized minority language in Sudan and Eritrea and should probably be included.
- Tshwa is generally regarded as a Khoe language like Khoekhoe, not a separate family.