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%).