Wednesday, April 2, 2008

East Timor's official and work languages not the same

East Timor has a complicated language situation. The 2 official languages are Portuguese, which almost no one speaks, and Tetum, a native language with 16 dialects spoken by 80% that is greatly influenced by Portuguese (40% of the vocabulary is from Portuguese). Apparently Tetum doesn't have the vocabulary for sophisticated concepts (which is a sign that it may one day become endangered) and the day-to-day working languages are Indonesian and English. Even the government, which requires civil servants to know Portuguese, uses Indonesian day-to-day.

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