Some words are very beautiful. Their sound is also beautiful like SUCCESS....HAPPY....WEALTH. Try to say loudly any of these words 'SUCCESS...SUCCESS...SUCCESS' or HAPPY...HAPPY...HAPPY' or 'WEALTH...WEALTH...WEALTH'. Observe what happen.Although these are beautiful words,yet they evolve different emotions in different people. Very strange.It all depends on your mental attitude. These words can inspire one whereas can also cause depression in others. Actually these are THOUGHTS which can cause inspiration or depression. If a person has remained failure in his life, then these words,if uttered, will remind him of his failures and cause depression. Everything connected with success will evoke negative feelings.

WE HAVE POWER TO CHANGE OUR LIFE

THOUGHTS play a vital role in our life. GOD has created us to expand, to grow, because HE wants HIS creations to grow.Even a small grass leaf can penetrate through a solid wall,if it comes in between its growth. After all we are human beings and have greater powers to grow,but if one is a failure in all his actions, then his thoughts also become negative and even a slight sound of above stated words can have negative impact.

WILL-POWER is the only power which can change our lives.With deep concentration,we can enhance our will power. Remember last time when you deeply concentrated on even your actions.You have not. If we make it a habit to concentrate on ourselves,then forget about failures.The best method is to think seriously about all of your actions before going to bed at night.Explore all the actions/reactions and find out your strengths and weaknesses. Think of ways to improve our strengths and remove our weaknesses.By this way we will have a good concentration power and of course WILL POWER.

A strong Will Power can change our destiny,our life,I mean to say that you can change your life with strong will power. Thus main aim of our life should be to increase our will power. Concentration and Will Powers are our steering wheels,which can take us to heights of HIMALAYA.

Discussions are not only formal.. We often discuss Informally...

Consider a situation that you are enjoying songs on a radio or TV and suddenly your favourite song is aired. Your immediate temptation is to increase the volume. Why?Its because you want others also to listen to it. You want to let others know that you like this song. In such a situation if someone else happens to comment,”Aha! This song is from XYZ movie”,a conversation takes place immediately between you and that some one else. If both of you have,by chance,watched the movie”,you find yourself discussing about the hero,heroin,villain and the story including what you liked and what you did not like.

Here starts an Informal Group Discussion...

Ever thought why are we engaging ourselves in conversations?The reason is that man is a social animal. Man likes to be associated with a society. i.e, a group. He has a natural desire to be the part of a group. This desire is so strong that if a person is left to himself,with no one to talk to for a long period,he will develop symptoms of discomfort.

If you look back and think for a moment,you will realise that you will frequently enter into Discussion with others on one topic or the other. You would also have noticed that different persons have different opinions about a single event. Sometimes,you may be in agreement with one such opinions and sometimes you may have a contrary opinion of your own. If you do not agree with someone,you put forward your own view and give reasons why you have this view. Thus you are involuntarily trying to influence the other person's opinion. Similalrly,that other person,who has his own reasons for his opinion,discloses those reasons to you. Sometimes,you are able to convince him. Sometimes,you get convinced. Sometimes a heated conversation starts. You have thus seen that man's entire existence presupposes a relationship with other human beings. He influences them by speech and actions and in turn they affect him.

Why do people form groups and why do they have Group Discussion?It is a natural tendency,just like the natural tendency of liquids to find the lowest place and settle there. You throw a bucketful of water on the floor and the water will automatically find where the lowest place is regardless of the fact where you throw the water. Similarly we,the human beings,have a natural tendency to associate with others. In our childhood,we had our favourite students in school and playmates at home. We naturally become members of a group in which we feel comfortable or “at home”. Most of us are more comfortable in some kinds of situation than in others. Likewise,groups are also more lively in the presence of some particular person that in presence of another. Here,stop for a moment. Let us have a small break. Think about yourself. Think about the kinds of people(groups) in which you prefer to keep quiet. Think about the conditions that increase your comfort level and those which discourage you. This way,although you will not be able to create an ideal environment for yourself every time, but you will have a better understanding of yourself. You will know your shortcomings. Once these are clear to you, you have the natural instincts to find the remedy or learn how to manage them.

You have seen that you have always been having discussion in your personal life. What you said during this discussion,came naturally to you without any preparation. You conversed with people who were known to you,you also conversed with strangers. Sometimes you have even argued without fully understanding the subject matter of the argument. So why this special preparation for Group Discussion now? You would say that those were personal and informal group discussion,outcome of which did not make any difference and that these personal discussion are quite different from the formal “Group Discussion” on which your whole career and life depends. I do not intend to disagree with you. The only thing I want you to realise is that you already know what GD is. You have some practise of it also. All you are to do is to refine your talents...!!

Intorduction

The recent statistical report says that, in the continent of Africa there are more than 200 languages spoken by the people.To be specific the number of languages, spoken in African continent lies between 2000 and 3000 languages.

Apart from this there are over 8000  dialects, that fits into these 300 languages.The major four classification of  language families that are spoken in Africa can be divided into six types namely

1)Afro - Asiatic

2)Nilo - Saharan

3)Niger - Congo A

4)Niger - Congo B

5)Khoi - San

6)Austronesian

The image below shows exactly where these kind of languages are spoken

To be specific most these African Languages are group of languages that are native to the African continent(with some exception) and the the scholars estimate that out of these 3000 different kinds of languages 50  languages may have 500,000 or more speakers.

But the fact is that the majority of African languages are spoken only by relatively few people. For example languages like Hadza,which is spoken in Tanzania, unfortunately ranks among the languages with the fewest speakers, because reports says that only about 200 people speak this language and the people who speak this Hazda language are called as the Hazda people and the image belows shows the Hazda people

On the contrary the most widely spoken languages includes Swahili and Hausa and it is estimated that more than 50 million people speak Swahili, and this language is spoken by the people who live in East and Central Africa.

In the case of Hausa language, report says that about 25 million people speak this language, and primarily they are located in the West African country of Nigeria. Apart form these two languages other other African languages with large numbers of speakers includes

1)Fulfulde in Senegal, Cameroon, and Chad

2)Yoruba in Nigeria and Benin

3)Igbo in Nigeria.

But apart from all these reports the truth is that not all languages spoken in Africa are native to the continent. The Northern Africa speak Arabic as their first language, and it was brought to Africa by immigrants from Arabia between the 7th and the 11th centuries.

In the case of Madagascar Malagasy is the language spoken by most of the people, and belongs to the Austronesian group of languages with origins in Indonesia. Apart from this, starting from the 15th century the European colonists brought English, French, and Portuguese to Africa.

Niger - Congo Family

This Niger-Congo family descends from a protolanguage which has its history 5000 years back.It has been estimated that f rom30 crores to 40 crores of people in Africa used to speak the languages in the Niger-Congo . This Niger - Congo family has seven main subgroups.The image below shows the map of Africa, which shows variou languages spoken in different parts of the continent.

The seven subgroups of the Niger-Congo family includes

1)Benue-Congo (including Bantu)

2)West Atlantic

3)Mande

4)Voltaic

5)Kwa

6)Adamawa East and

7)Kordofanian.

1)Benue-Congo (including Bantu)

Out of this seven, six of which cover West Africa and the Central African Republic. One of the language which comes under the Benue-Congo is the Bantu language and  is a single offshoot. This Bantu is spoken in most of the southern half of Africa.

The Benue-Congo subgroup is the largest branch of the Niger-Congo family.Report states that over 100 million people speak the Bantu language.

This Batu language is the largest rapidly growing language in Africa , with its users are rapidly increasing.Historians and archaeologists found a reason for this and they have found that the rapid expansion of Bantu languages begin from the proto-Bantu in Cameroon and eastern Nigeria and history reveals that it occurred in three major waves of migration, from 3000 to 4000 years ago.

These researches says that the first wave of expansion was created in North Bantu and it was succedde by the second and third expansions which was developed into Western and Eastern Bantu.

Of these Bantu languages, the most widely spoken language is Swahili and in Africa there are some 50 million speakers,and they are mostly concentrated to Eastern Bantu.Apart from this Bantu language, other Bantu languages are given below based on the region where they are used by the people

Bantu Languages spoken in Southern Africa:

i)Shona

ii)Tswana

iii)Zulu

iv)Xhosa


Bantu Languages spoken Eastern Africa:

i)Kikuyu

ii)Kisukuma

iii)Luo

Bantu Languages spoken Central Africa:

i)Kikongo

ii)Kinyarwanda

iii)Kirundi

2)West Atlantic

The West Atlantic subgroup are spoken mostly near the Africa’s Atlantic coast,and the countries which speak these languages includes from Senegal to Chad.In this family the dominant language which is used by most of the people is Fulfulde.

This Fulfulde has more than 13 million speakers and they are mostly used by people in Senegal, Cameroon, and Chad. Apart from this languages, other languages in this subgroup is

i)"Wolof" used in Senegal and

ii)"Temne" in Guinea.

3)Mande

Usually the languages in this sub group are spoken in

i)Senegal

ii)Mali

iii)Guinea

iv)Liberia

v)Sierra Leone.

In this subgroup Bambara,which is spoken in Mali, is considered the principal language .Other Mande languages in this catoegary includes

i)"Mende" spoken in Sierra Leone

ii)"Kpelle" spoken in Liberia and Guinea.

4)Voltaic

The other name for this Voltaic sub group is Gur,this language has speakers in different countries in Africa and it includes

i)Mali

ii)Cote d’Ivoire

iii)Ghana

iv)Togo

v)Benin

vi)Nigeria and

vii)Burkina Faso.

5)Kwa

The two most important language which comes under this subgroup includes the Twi and Yoruba, and they are mainly in Ghana and Nigeria respectively. Apart rom these two language, the language which is spoken widely in this subgroup is Yoruba, which has speakers of more than 22 million.

Other than these languages other Kwa languages are spoken in countries like

i)Liberia

ii)Cote d’Ivoire

iii)Togo and

iv)Benin.

6)Adamawa East

Most the languages of the Adamawa East subgroup are spoken widely in three important countries and these includes

i)Cameroon

ii)The Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) and

iii)The Central African Republic.

7)Kordofanian

The last subgroup of the Niger- Congo family is the Kordofanian subgroup and it has fewer than 500,000 speakers and they are found especially in the Nuba mountains of Sudan. The important language under this sub divison is Moro and it has about 30,000 speakers

Afro -Asiatic Family

Features of Afro - Asiatic family

The languages belong to this Afro-Asiatic family is spoken by around 20 crores to 30 crores people in Africa.Usually the languages to Afro-Asiatic family shares many features and one shared feature is the emphatic consonant, i.e, the amount of stress which the speaker places on a consonant changes for  the meaning of certain words.

For example,let us consider the language of one of the subgroup of this family Hausa. In Hausa word "mana" literally means “for us,” whereas with an emphatic pronunciation of the consonant n in manna, it means “press against.”

Apart from this the languages in this family, also distinguish between masculine and feminine nouns.In the case of the feminine nouns, they typically have a final t. For example, in one of the language in this family , i.e,. in the language called Amharic, the word for man is "sew" and for woman is "set" and similary "ligu" means boy, and "ligitu" means girl.

Distribution

The main region where lots of people spek the languages belong to this family includes, the speakers from

i)Northern Africa

ii)Somalia

iii)Ethiopia

iv)Eritrea and

v)The area around Lake Chad in central Africa.

Subgroups

Usually when we look into this Afro - Asiatic languages, the  basic vocabulary which they use  reflects a pastoral life spent raising and herding livestock and also growing food crops.Under this Afro-Asiatic family , there is further divison and it is divided into five subgroups and these five subgroups usually contains more than 350 languages

The 5 subgroups of the Afro - Asiatic family includes

1)Chadic

2)Berber

3)Semitic

4)Cushitic and

5)Egyptian.

History goes wayback in years with respect to this family of languages, as the protolanguage of this family, which began to diverge into separate branches about 6000 years ago,and so it is called as ancestral Semitic.This family is also the protolanguage of other Semitic languages, which includes Arabic and Hebrew.Now let us disscuss each of this subgroup in detail.The image below shows the distribution of these sub groups in Africa

1)Chadic

#)This sub group consists of more that 100 languages

#)The number of speakers for this language is about 3 crores people

#)So naturally this language is considered as the most spoken language for this subgroup

#)This made this language as the most important language of this family.

#)Of this subgroup,the principal language is Hausa and it is also the most important language in the Afro-Asiatic family.

#)More than 2.2 crore of people speak Hausa and the consider this as their first language or some people consider this as  fluent second language

#)The people speaking Hausa are conined mainly in the region of Northern Nigeria and southern Niger.

#)Apart from these large number of speakers for Hausa,it also serves as the lingua franca,i.e, this is language which is used for trade and communication especially in  Western African countries like Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire, and also in some parts of Libya.

#)But historians believe that Hausa has borrowed many words from neighboring languages, such as Yoruba, Tuareg and also extensively from Arabic.

2)Berber

#)The number of speakers for this language is about 1.1 crores people and it is confiend mostly to Northern Africa

#)The most dominant language of this group,is Tamarshak (also spelled as Tamasheq),and it is spoken by the Tuareg people.

3)Semitic

#)Semitic languages includes languages like Amharic and Tigrinya

#)Their linguists trace back to Ge’ez,which is a type of language spoken mostly in northern Ethiopia more than 2000 years ago.

4)Cushitic

#)The principal languages includes Beja and Oromo

#)Beja language is spoken in Sudan and Eritrea

#)The languauge Oromo is mostly spoken in Ethiopia.

5)Egyptian

#)The history for this Egyptian subgroup of language goes back to 5000 years ago

#)But unfortunately historians believ thaese Egyptian language has not been spoken for about 600 years.

#)The last and final phase of this groups is the language called as as Coptic, remains alive as the liturgical language of the Coptic Church.

Nilo - Saharan family

The Nilo-Saharan languages are mostly tonal and some of the  Nilo-Saharan languages add both prefixes and suffixes to verbs while others add only suffixes.

However the Nilo-Saharan languages do not have a noun class agreement system like that of the Bantu languages of the Niger-Congo family.This Nilo-Saharan language family mainly covers the following regions

i)Most parts of Eastern Sahara

ii)The upper Nile Valley

iii)Areas around Lake Victoria in east central Africa and

iv)The Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Around 1.8 crores tp 3 crores of people speak the languages which comes under this Nilo - Saharan languauge family.This Nilo-Saharan language family is divided into six subgroups and these includes

1)Nilotic (or Chari-Nile)

2)Songhai

3)Saharan

4)Maban

5)Koman and

6)Fur.

The ancestral language tongue was spoken was more than 1000 years ago and it is mainly spoken by the people in the Sahara between Chad and the Nile.

1)Nilotic (or Chari-Nile)

Out of the above six subgroups, Nilotic language is spoken widely,and this language is spoken along the Nile and Chari rivers. Languages in this subgroup includes

i)Luo - spoken in Kenya

ii)Masai (or Maasai) - spoken in Kenya and Tanzania and

iii)Nubian - spoken along the Nile Valley in Sudan and Egypt

Apart from the above languages, other languages in this subgroup are spoken mainly in countries mentioned below

i)Chad

ii)Ethiopia

iii)Uganda

iv)The Democratic Republic of the Congo and

v)The Central African Republic.

2)Songhai

Next subgroup is the Songhai and it is spoken along the Niger River in Mali and Niger.

3)Saharan

The Saharan subgroup group comprises languages that includes

i)Kanuri - spoken in Nigeria

ii)Teda - spoken in central Sahara and

iii)Zaghawa - spoken in Chad and Sudan.

4)Maban

Maban subgroup is spoken in mainly in Chad

5)Koman

The languages which are spoken under the Koman subgroup and they are mainly spoken along the portion of the border between Ethiopia and Sudan.

6)Fur

The last subgroup is the Fur subgroup and it is another small subgroup which is spoken in the Darfur province of Sudan.

Khoi - San language family

In the Khoi - San language family, more than 12 languages are available and it is divided into two subgroups

i)South African Khoi -  San

ii)East African Khoi - San

Report says that there are around two lakhs to three lakhs people in Africa speak these languages.

Languages of South African Khoi - San:

The languages of South African Khoi - San includes

i)Nama

ii)Naron

These two type oflanguages are spoken mainly

i)In and around the Kalahari Desert of northern South Africa

ii)Southwestern Botswana

iii)Namibia

Languages of East African Khoi - San:

The languages of East African Khoisan mainly includes

i)Sandawe

ii)Hadza

These two type of languages are spokenmainly in Tanzania.

#)Many people were exposed to a Khoi - San language through the actor Nǃxau during the 1980 film The Gods Must Be Crazy.The image below shows some of the people who speak  Kho - Sian language

Gaurav keeps calling on his friend Abhishek’s mobile but Abhishek keeps disconnecting it, Sonali keeps pinging her cousin who always replies back with this sentence “Catch you Later”, and some reactions are I don’t want to talk about that, I don’t feel like meeting her anymore, let’s not discuss that, it was just a past, I am not in touch with Sunil who used to be my best friend at school.

I m sure many of you would have encountered a situation where u would have reacted as above. That’s how we react when we overlook our past relations (any kind of relationship) and intend to forget them. Yeah I know what we all agree with, life means get going and not sticking with one thing, life means experimenting and not just getting along with routine stuffs , life is so busy that there is no time to think for anything and if nothing works out, the best tool we use is to blame it on someone else. But the unfortunate part is we start feeling the same for our relations and also for the people whom we are related with without realizing that it’s nothing to do with our life or time rather it’s us who want to get rid of something/somebody.

Case study 1:-Ruchi was very happy to see her cousin sister cum friend, Priyanka after a long time. Ruchi had her weekend off and visited Priyanka who was in Pune.Priyanka didn’t seem to be very keen to meet Ruchi which was very evident on her face and by her unusual behaviour. While Ruchi had so many things to tell Priyanka, on the other hand Priyanka didn’t have time for them. She was busy in talking to her friends on phone and texting them and also with her roommate who was there at that point of time. Ruchi was embarrassed but priyanka didn’t bother about it at all. Ruchi was disheartened and she couldn’t figure out the reason for Priyanka’s unnatural behaviour.Priyanka didn’t seem to be upset or sad about anything .So was she just avoiding Ruchi or had she got so many friends now that she didn’t require her cousin sister anymore? Whatever it was, Ruchi was not expecting this and since then all her feelings, emotions and thoughts for Priyanka were altered. They are hardly in touch with each other.

Case study 2:- Rohan & Vikas had been very good friends since their childhood. Now they are working. Two years back they got admission in MBA. They were extremely happy for the fact that they were in the same college and will have a good time together. The first year went well for them. They studied together, supported each other when any problem arose, and both of them did well in the exams. Vikas was quite worried about his career and stuff like that. Rohan had been a great support for Vikas. Vikas wanted to achieve everything very fast and he started expanding his contacts. He made a lot of new friends and started interacting with people from different backgrounds in order to get a good career. But while he was doing all this, he forgot about Rohan who in spite of being equally worried, always helped and consoled Vikas. Rohan did make new friends but never overlooked Vikas. On the other hand Vikas wanted to get rid of Rohan as he believed presence of Vikas in his life wouldn’t let him make new friends and new contacts. So slowly and gradually they started getting disconnected from each other.

Do we ever make an attempt to understand “Is anything worth at the cost of splitting from our near and dear ones”, “Why someone, praising whom you were never tired of, is now turned into somebody whom you can’t stand at all”? No we don’t, why should we waste our time thinking about something which happened 2 -3 years back, Why should I take the effort, she should apologise. We would have hundreds and thousands of reasons for not doing so but just for one reason i.e to safeguard our relations, we should ponder why we actually forget old relations.

• Don’t feel the requirement: - May be you feel the person is not of any help to you so you don’t require him/her anymore.
• Too many things: May be you are preoccupied with so many things in your life like job, spouse, children, boss etc. that you don’t want to take the effort of still maintaining old relations.
• Expanded group: - If you have enhanced your friend circle and have added many people in your contact list, you would no longer remember /miss your old buddies.
• Change of priority:-As you grow, different things like education, career, money, house, new people, work, etc get added in your bucket list and accordingly your priorities change. So you stop speculating about people with whom you used to be appended to few years back.
• Taken for granted: - Have you started assuming that your dearest friend will do anything for you if you are in any troublesome situation? If yes, it means you have actually started taking your friend for granted which will jeopardise your friendship.
• Unpleasant experience: - You might have had some experience with a person which could have generated a friction in between you both. This can also become a reason for you to get disconnected with that person.
• Unsorted misunderstandings: - Many a times you believe what others say and you just leave the things like that without elucidating the misunderstandings that you have in your mind. Any unsorted misunderstanding may lead to break up of any relation.
• Ego: - The whole story of human beings and their relations will be incomplete without talking about their EGO. Your ego can be a big hurdle for any of your relations. You believe he should apologize to you, he should give you a phone call first, he should take the initiative for patch up & and many more such things your ego tells you to believe. That’s how ego takes you away even from your close ones.

Whatever the reasons could be, if you still have a longing to maintain and not forget a relation that you shared once with a person, you will be able to do so. Sounds difficult?? Let’s brainstorm and see whether the following facts are convincing enough for you to keep up with your old relations or not:-

• Do change your priorities but avoid omitting & deleting your old realtions from your bucket list. You can manage to give them a call, or ping them, write to them at least once/year. Believe it or not, your buddies, friends, won’t mind even if you keep them last in your Bucket list of priorities.

• If you are a kind of person who feels proud of having a fantastic PR based on the number of people in your friend list of Orkut, Facebook, etc, you will just be left with shallow & fragile relations. So if you are really yearning for deep and candid relations ignore the quantity but don’t ignore the quality by being in constant touch with your true and old friends.

• Learn to respect people and more importantly whatever they have done for you. It doesn’t matter if they helped you 5 years back or 5days back. Remember such people never lose their kindness, generosity & honesty and you never know people whom who you feel are not required anymore may be the one to hold you up when you don’t find anybody in your surroundings to back you up.

• Be forgetful about incidents and not your relations: - It doesn’t take seconds for you to decide that you will never meet a person who lied to you even for a small thing, or who didn’t treat you well. But it’s a herculean task for all of us to forget such incidents and by the time we forget them, the person on the other side has already forgotten us. Try not to hold any grudge against anybody, if it’s there talk it out. Forgetting the person will be costly affair than forgetting such incidents as it takes whole lot of your energy, commitment, trust, honesty and many more such things to begin & build a relation.

• Always try to have clear and open communications. It helps you to sort out any of your misunderstandings and thus facilitates your relations.

• Try to keep your ego aside and make a phone call to your old friend /relative whom you have not spoken to for ages just because of ego.

• Last but not the least, if you after reading all this, think that you will make the whole of it a big laughing stock, I am sorry friend, you are absolutely mistaken as I trust myself and my friends out there that you wouldn’t find anyone to join you in that fun of yours. So if you still feel honoured in telling people that you are a very pragmatic & practical person and you don’t belive in emotions, feelings, commitments etc, you are making things extremely difficult for you. It’s always wise for us to keep ourselves miles away from such person to save our relations.

So people what are you waiting for now, go and get your telephone dairy and start calling up people (who used to be very close to you) whom you have not heard from for ages, write to those from whom you disconnected yourself completely due to some sort of misunderstanding or because of your ego. We don’t what will be the reaction on the other end of the line but certainly you will find yourself to be happy, relaxed & at peace. All the best friends!!!