Africa is the second largest continent in the world, not only in terms of geography, given that its population goes up to over 1.5 billion of inhabitants. It is one of the most diverse continents globally, largely due to this population density. No wonder that linguists estimate that around 2,000 native languages are spoken in Africa.
African language families
Native African languages are divided into four main families:
Afro-Asiatic languages: spoken by 400 million people in the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Sahel region. This group is made up by over 240 languages.
Niger-Congo languages: probably the largest language family in the world. They are spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Nilo-Saharan languages: spoken by 50 million people in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers.
Khoisan languages: 100,000 speakers and they include all the languages characterised by the use of clicks.
This classification is based on the studies carried out by the linguist Joseph Greenberg, author of The Languages of Africa published in 1963.
Languages spoken in Africa
Despite the fact that the term “African language or tongue” is sometimes used, there is no one African language as such; rather, the inhabitants of this continent use multiple different tongues and languages on their everyday life.
Some of the languages spoken in Africa are:
Arabic: the Arabic language is the most spoken language on the continent. In North Africa, it is used by 210 million people to communicate on a daily basis.
Amharic: it is the second most spoken Semitic language in the world after Arabic. There are around 25 million speakers, the majority of whom are in Ethiopia.
Afrikaans: it is the third most spoken language in South Africa where there are almost 7 million speakers.
Lingala: it is spoken in the Congo by more than 10 million people.
Somali: it is used by approximately 24 million speakers in Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Yemen and Kenya
Swahili: it is one of the official languages of the inhabitants of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda and one of the most widely spoken in the East Africa region. In total, between 60 and 150 million people speak Swahili.
Yoruba: roughly 45 million people speak Yoruba in the western region of Africa. It is the native language of the people of Nigeria, Benin and Togo, as well as some communities in other areas of Africa, Europe and America.
Zulu: it is the language of the Zulu people made up of approximately 11 million speakers, the vast majority (more than 95%) live in South Africa.
European languages in Africa
One of the main impacts of the colonisation of Africa was the arrival of European languages to the continent: they are mainly used as lingua franca (or vehicular languages) in many countries today.
Languages such as German, English and French were brought to the continent by colonists, although the assimilation of these languages on this continent was not as successful as in it was in European territories.
In this respect, the linguist Salikoko Mufwene from the University of Chicago affirms in one of his studies that: Traditional African kingdoms were not as assimilationist as the European empires… The Europeans that colonised these territories relied on interpreters to communicate with the indigenous civilization and, as this intensified, new lingua franca emerged, so it’s no surprise that there are so many languages spoken in Africa.
Interesting facts about languages spoken in Africa
More than 500 different languages are spoken in Nigeria. The official language is English, but many people speak Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Urhobo, Ibibio, Edo, Fulfulde and Kanuri. These languages belong to three different families: Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo, the first three languages are considered majority languages.
Swahili is the most spoken Niger-Congo language. Furthermore, it is one of the languages with the most speakers in the whole of Africa and is the lingua franca of western Africa. Teaching Swahili is compulsory in schools in Kenya.
Many of the characters from Disney’s “The Lion King” use words in Swahili as names.
Malagasy is different to the other languages of Africa. Before the French colonised the island of Madagascar, it was inhabited by the people of South-East Asia. This is the reason behind its relation to other languages spoken in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Polynesia.
There are 8 national languages and 11 official languages in South Africa: English, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Northern Sotho, Tswana, Tsonga, Swati, Venda and Sotho. According to the country’s census, only 2% of South Africans speak one of these languages as their main language.
The Ge’ez system is used to write Amharic and Tigrinya. This writing system is called “Fidel”, which means writing or alphabet. Amharic is the official language of Ethiopia, while Tigrinya is mainly spoken in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, in the Horn of Africa.
Nama language (Khoekhoe) is the only officially recognised Khoisan language. It is the official language in Namibia, where it is used in education as well as in the media.
Many Khoisan languages are endangered.
Only six Nilo-Saharan languages have more than one million speakers: Luo, Kanuri, Kalenjin, Zarma, Dinka and Lugbara.
Undoubtedly, the large variety of languages spoken in Africa would enable numerous articles to be written about them. What would you like us to expand on in the next article?
