A look on some populations’ translations of modern world notions and objects is equally amusing and instructive: it shows how imaginative men & women can be when it comes to adapting foreign concepts into a given culture, without necessarily having to re-use the actual word in its original form (here English or French).

New words in Punu

Punu is the language of the Bapunu, second largest ethnic group in Gabon in terms of population. It’s a Bantu language, spoken in the Tchibanga area. The increasingly important movement of Bapunu people towards larger urban areas is causing a gradual loss of their language and cultural knowledge.

In the following video, we specially recommend Thierry Nzamba’s translation in punu for “car” and Jean-Emile’s for “fridge”!

Read description sheet on Punu

See all videos on Punu

Linguist: Jean-Marie Hombert
Image and sound: Luc-Henri Fage
Editing: Caroline Laurent

New words in Mpongwe

Following the Akoa Pygmies, nowadays extinct, the Mpongwe people are the first inhabitants of Libreville, on the north bank of the Gabon estuary. The number of Mpongwe speakers has now dropped under 5000. In awareness of their traditional heritage being threatened with extinction, the Mpongwe have created structures for the protection of their language and culture.

Here it is Henriette and Kialla who utter some new words of their language!

See all the videos in Mpongwe

Linguist: Patrick Mouguiama-Daouda
Image and sound: Muriel Lutz
Editing: Caroline Laurent

New words in Tamasheq

Tamasheq (or Tamajeq, or Tamaheq, stemming from the word Tamazight) is spoken by the Tuareg, a nomadic people that has been settled in the desert areas of North Africa for millennia, over a vast territory reaching from Mali to Libya, from Burkina Faso to Algeria, and including Niger. There are around one million speakers of Tamasheq.

Like Kabyle, Shawia, or Rifian, Tamasheq is in fact a variant of Berber (or Tamazight), a group of languages that covers the whole of North Africa (Marocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Niger, Mauritania, Mali, and Burkina Faso), not to mention a large diaspora in Europe and America.

In this video, poet and teacher Mohamed Hamza rightly points out that, like any language confronted to the challenges of globalization, his language includes neologisms invented by the younger generation and adaptions of foreign so-called “international” common words – considering how similar they are in every language. Local taste, of course.

See all videos on Tamasheq

Image & sound: Arnaud Contreras
Language advice: Salem Mezhoud and Abdoulahi Attayoub
Editing: Caroline Laurent