Re: Other than mother-tongue speakers of an unlisted language, how many Ke
[#permalink]
04 Mar 2025, 04:21
This was a difficult graph. The information is broken down and presented in a couple of different places, plus there are notes at the bottom. There are at least three different linguistic families of Kenyan languages: Bantoid, Nilotic, and Kushitic, and we're given a breakdown of the major languages within each of those families. It's important to realize that all those numbers are mother-tongued speakers, and the note at the bottom tells us that each Kenyan is assumed to have exactly one mother tongue. Below this chart we get the number of mother-tongue speakers of unlisted African languages. Note that some of these unlisted African languages could fall into one of the families outlined above; the lists above are only of the major languages. So a Kenyan with an African mother tongue could be listed in a couple of different places: either someplace on the chart, or else with the other unlisted African language speakers. Does this take care of everyone who lives in Kenya, then? No, so far we have only dealt with those who have African mother tongues. Some could have a non-African mother tongue: English, for instance. And we see confirmation of this: the note that goes with the total population of Kenya, tells us that the popula-tion includes speakers of non-African languages.
$3,123,000$
At the bottom of the Nilotic (Nilo-Saharan) column we see there are 5,933,000 speakers of Nilotic languages total. Of these 2,810,000 speak Luo, a Western Nilotic language, while the rest are the Eastern Nilotic speakers we're interested in. Subtract the Luo speakers from the total to find the number of Eastern Nilotic speakers, but do it roughly to save time. (The answer choices aren't that close together.) The difference is a little more than 3 million; 3,123,000 must be our answer.