3.4.d. Mozambique
Mozambique is one of the countries where the Portuguese has the
statute of official language, being spoken, essentially as a second
language, by a part of its population.
According to the Census of 1980, the Portuguese language was spoken
by about 25% of the population and was the mother tongue of little
more than 1% of the Mozambican. The Census of 1997 indicates that the
current percentage of Portuguese speakers already is 39.6%, that 8.8%
use the Portuguese to speak at home and that 6.5% consider the
Portuguese as their mother tongue. The vast majority of the people who
have the Portuguese language as their mother tongue inhabit in the
urban areas of the country and the ones that adopt the Portuguese as
the language of using at home are also mainly urban citizens. In the
country as a whole, the majority of the population speaks languages of
the Bantu group. The more frequent mother tongue is the Emakhuwa
language (26.3%); in second place is the Xichangana (11.4%) and in
third, the Elomwe (7.9%).
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