We switch gears now for a story from Rwanda. You’ll probably remember that in the mid-1990s, a horrific conflict between the country’s two main ethnic groups, the Hutus and the Tutsis, resulted in the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of others of both groups. Since then, Rwanda has been trying to repair its civic life after the genocide, and that struggle, in part, has led to a change in language. The Rwandan government wants to replace French with English as the language of business, diplomacy and scholarship.
We wanted to know more, so we called Stephanie Nolen. She’s a correspondent for the Canadian newspaper the Globe and Mail. She is based in South Africa, but she recently returned from a trip to Rwanda. And I asked her which languages most Rwandans speak now. NPR, November 20, 2008 Read the whole article…
