The traditional language families spoken in Africa:
The languages of Africa are divided into six major language families:
- Afroasiatic languages are spread throughout Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and parts of the Sahel.
- Austronesian languages are spoken in Madagascar.
- Indo-European languages are spoken in South Africa and Namibia (Afrikaans, English, German) and are used as lingua francas in the former colonies of Britain (English), former colonies of France (French), former colonies of Portugal (Portuguese), former colonies of Spain (Spanish) and the current Spanish territories of Ceuta, Melilla and the Canary Islands (Spanish).
- Khoe languages are concentrated in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia and Botswana.
- Niger–Congo languages (Bantu and non-Bantu) cover West, Central, Southeast and Southern Africa.
- Nilo-Saharan languages (unity debated) are spoken from Tanzania to Sudan and from Chad to Mali.
There are several other small families and language isolates, as well as languages that have yet to be classified. In addition, Africa has a wide variety of sign languages, many of which are language isolates (see below).
The total number of languages natively spoken in Africa is variously estimated (depending on the delineation of language vs. dialect) at between 1,250 and 2,100, and by some counts at “over 3,000”, Nigeria alone has over 500 languages (according to the count of SIL Ethnologue), one of the greatest concentrations of linguistic diversity in the world. However, “One of the notable differences between Africa and most other linguistic areas is its relative uniformity. With few exceptions, all of Africa’s languages have been gathered into four major phyla.”
Around a hundred languages are widely used for inter-ethnic communication. Arabic, Somali, Berber, Amharic, Oromo, Igbo, Swahili, Hausa, Manding, Fulani and Yoruba are spoken by tens of millions of people. Twelve dialect clusters (which may group up to a hundred linguistic varieties) are spoken by 75 percent, and fifteen by 85 percent, of Africans as a first or additional language. Although many mid-sized languages are used on the radio, in newspapers and in primary-school education, and some of the larger ones are considered national languages, only a few are official at the national level. The African Union declared 2006 the “Year of African Languages”.
Demographics
Of the 1 billion Africans (in 2009), about 17 percent speak an Arabic dialect. About 10 percent speak Swahili, the lingua franca of Southeast Africa; about 5 percent speak a Berber dialect; and about 5 percent speak Hausa, which serves as a lingua franca in much of the Sahel. Other important West African languages are Yoruba, Igbo and Fula. Major Horn of Africa languages are Amharic, Oromo and Somali. Important South African languages are Zulu, Xhosa and Afrikaans.
English, French and Portuguese are important languages in Africa. About 130 million, 115 million and 30 million Africans, respectively, speak them as either native or secondary languages. Portuguese has become the national language of Angola.
Through (among other factors) sheer demographic weight, Africans are increasingly taking ownership of these three world languages and having an ever-greater influence on their development and growth.
Semantic
Quite often, only one term is used for both animal and meat; the word nama or nyama for animal/meat is particularly widespread in otherwise widely divergent African languages.
Number of speakers
The following is a table displaying the number of speakers of given languages within Africa:
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Thanks. Information about Arabs and Africans doing rape and murder is important, but also boring and depressing. I try to post other things, that might have some relationship to the general problems and that can supports other posts. I have one more post about African language, that this post will be linked to.
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Yes, I have the same tendency of looking at the bigger settings to understand the issues at hand.
It is interesting to me that Australian aboriginal language is spoken by Polynesians, Jap. Ainu, Taiwanese natives, Vietnamese highlanders, Madagascan, etc..
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We properly have to, in most cases. There are usually no easy answers or simple explanations, to complex matters.
Considering that Germanic people, speak Germanic languages and have Germanic cultures, Austronesian speakers are very diverse. Vietnamese highlanders dont look like Australian aboriginals at all.
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Something I never expect:
Some Indonesians like going to Vietnam because they can talk and understand Vietnamese highlanders and Champa people.
But later I found that the same kind of Champa buildings, monuments exist in both countries.
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Interesting, and very impressive buildings. Its funny they can speak together, but I dont understand Icelandic. It can sometimes even be hard to understand Swedish.
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