Abstract
The article investigates the creation of language statistics in the Sudan, from the beginning of the twentieth century up to the division of the country into two states. Like many other African countries, Sudan is characterized by a high degree of ethnic and linguistic diversity that has participated in the fueling of murderous civil wars since independence. The article recontextualizes the construction of the ethno-linguistic categories and statistics within their broader political and administrative contexts. It analyzes the objectives and output of each type of statistics and questions their influence on the foreign and native representations of Sudanese society.
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Appendix

Rejaf Report (page 1)

Maps from the Nuba Mountain Language Survey, Bell (1995)
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Surveying languages: the art of governing speakers with numbers
- It’s all about English: the interplay of monolingual ideologies, language policies and the U.S. Census Bureau’s statistics on multilingualism
- How to ask questions on language? Ideological struggles in the making of a state survey
- Counting matters: quantifying the vitality and value of Basque
- “In the mouth of an aborigine”: language ideologies and logics of racialization in the Linguistic Survey of India
- Language and ethnic statistics in twentieth century Sudanese censuses and surveys
- Book Reviews
- Luis Fernando Angosto Ferrández Sabine Kradolfer: Everlasting countdowns: race, ethnicity and national censuses in Latin American states
- Cacophonies d’empire: Le gouvernement des langues dans l’Empire russe et l’Union soviétique
- Small Languages and Small Language Communities
- Tracing the “extinctness” of Tai Ahom: issues of language loss and death
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Surveying languages: the art of governing speakers with numbers
- It’s all about English: the interplay of monolingual ideologies, language policies and the U.S. Census Bureau’s statistics on multilingualism
- How to ask questions on language? Ideological struggles in the making of a state survey
- Counting matters: quantifying the vitality and value of Basque
- “In the mouth of an aborigine”: language ideologies and logics of racialization in the Linguistic Survey of India
- Language and ethnic statistics in twentieth century Sudanese censuses and surveys
- Book Reviews
- Luis Fernando Angosto Ferrández Sabine Kradolfer: Everlasting countdowns: race, ethnicity and national censuses in Latin American states
- Cacophonies d’empire: Le gouvernement des langues dans l’Empire russe et l’Union soviétique
- Small Languages and Small Language Communities
- Tracing the “extinctness” of Tai Ahom: issues of language loss and death