Balanta
Language · official in 1 country
Balanta is really two closely related Bak languages, Balanta-Kentohe and Balanta-Ganja, spoken by the Balanta people of West Africa. The Senegalese one, Balanta-Ganja, was granted national language status in September 2000, which opened elementary school teaching to it, and its spelling in Senegal follows Decree No. 2005-979.
The language on record
- Script
- Not recorded
- Family
- Bak
- Official in
- 1 country
Where Balanta is official
Senegal is the one country on record. Its law treats Balanta as a national language, a category that sits below French, the sole official language of the state.
Official beside Balanta
About Balanta
Which two languages share the Balanta name
Balanta-Kentohe is spoken on the north central and central coast of Guinea-Bissau and in the Gambia. In Guinea-Bissau it had about 397,000 speakers in 2006, many of them in the Oio Region. Its Kəntɔhɛ dialect belongs to the north and Fora to the south, and the Naga, Mane and Kantohe dialects may be separate languages. Films and portions of the Bible have been produced in it.
Balanta-Ganja had 86,000 speakers in 2006, in the southwest corner and the south of Senegal. Its dialects are Fganja and Fjaalib. Literacy in it stood below 1%.
What national language status gives Balanta in Senegal
The 1978 constitution named six national languages, and Balanta was not among them. A change in 2001 opened the status to any indigenous language that had been codified. Codification asks for documentation of the language and an official orthography. Balant appears among the 25 languages the Directorate of Literacy and National Languages recognised as of 2023. The category carries no role in government, and its legal meaning is vague: French remains the only official language.
How the Senegalese spelling marks its sounds
Decree No. 2005-979 puts an acute accent on tense vowels to set them apart from lax ones. A prenasalised consonant is written with a nasal of the same place in front, as in mp, nt or ñj. Voiceless consonants are written by doubling the voiced letter, so bb stands for /p/. Balanta marks case with prefixes and suffixes, which some analyses read instead as a definite article that depends on the noun class.
Common questions
Questions about Balanta
What separates Balanta-Kentohe from Balanta-Ganja?
Mainly geography. Kentohe is the language of central and coastal Guinea-Bissau and parts of the Gambia, with about 397,000 speakers in Guinea-Bissau in 2006. Ganja belongs to southern Senegal, where it had 86,000 speakers the same year. The voiceless sounds [c k kp] are heard only in the Guinea-Bissau dialect.
Does Senegal treat Balanta as an official language?
No. It has been a national language since September 2000, which lets it be taught in elementary school, but French is the sole official language of Senegal.