Islam in Burkina Faso and order and by stimulating trade. They also tended to regard Muslims as culturally and educationally more advanced than non-Muslim Africans, and appointed Muslim chiefs and clerks as administrators in non-Muslim areas. In Upper Volta at the end of the 19th century there were only some 30,000 Muslims, but by 1959 there were 800,000, approximately 20 percent of the population. In 1984, Upper Volta was renamed Burkina Faso. After a succession of military coups, a constitutional republic was established in 1991. In Burkina Faso the Arabist and Islamist movement is viewed a counter-culture to the European style of modernity, and
Volta–Congo languages system employing vowel harmony and that this set has been reduced to a seven vowel-system in many Volta–Congo languages. The Ghana–Togo Mountain languages are examples of languages where nine- or ten-vowel systems are still found. Volta–Congo languages Volta–Congo is a hypothetical major branch of languages of the Niger–Congo family. It includes all the Niger-Congo languages and subfamilies except the families of the erstwhile Atlantic and Kordofanian branches, Mande, Dogon, Ijo and Balanta. It thus only differs from Atlantic–Congo in that it excludes the Atlantic languages and, in some conceptions, Kru and Senufo. In the infobox at the right, the languages