5/28/2023 0 Comments Conji languagest![]() ![]() The 40 to 70 languages in the Khoisan phylum include tongues that are mostly located in southern Africa - namely parts of Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Angola. Examples of Nilo-Saharan languages include Lugbara in Uganda, Zarma in Niger and Dholuo in Kenya. These tonal languages are spread throughout parts of central, eastern and northeastern Africa, including places like Chad, Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya. There are around 80 languages in the Nilo-Saharan family. The Afroasiatic family includes languages like Somali, Berber, Hausa and Oromo that exist in the Horn of Africa and across parts of the central Sahara and the northern region of the continent. The most widely spoken of these by far (and on the continent as a whole) is Arabic, which is estimated to have more than 150 million speakers, most of which are concentrated in northern African countries like Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Chad and Sudan, among others (the different dialects aren’t always mutually intelligible). The next biggest language phylum is the Afroasiatic language group, which includes between 200 and 300 tongues. There are far too many other Niger-Congo languages to list them all here! The Afroasiatic Languages Of Africa South Africa recognizes 9 Bantu languages - Xhosa, Ndebele, Zulu, Tswana, Swati, Sotho, Southern Sotho, Venda and Tsonga - as official languages in its constitution. Other Niger-Congo languages with populations of speakers in the millions include Yoruba (mostly in Nigeria), Amharic (in Ethiopia), Kirundi (in Burundi), Lingala (in the Congo), Sesotho (in Lesotho and parts of southern Africa) and Shona (in Zimbabwe). It’s sometimes considered the lingua franca of the African Great Lakes region because it’s so widely used and taught in schools in places like Tanzania, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Kenya, among others. It was influenced heavily by Arabic due in no small part to the history of trade between Africa and people from Arab lands. One of the Niger-Congo languages of Africa you might recognize most is Swahili, whose different dialects are spoken by about 16 million people natively and 82 million as a second language. They’re further sub-divided into the Bantu and the non-Bantu languages depending mostly on their geography, with the Bantu tongues found more toward the southern part of the Niger-Congo linguistic territory. They’re found across a wide span of the continent, mostly in the western, central, and southeastern regions. With between roughly 1,350 and 1,650 tongues within the language family, the Niger-Congo languages make up the largest language family in Africa - and in the world. Other language isolates, tongues that have yet to be classified and a handful of sign languages are sprinkled throughout the continent, too. Language scholars classify the languages of Africa into six different families, or phyla: the Niger-Congo languages, the Afroasiatic languages, the Nilo-Saharan languages, the Khoisan languages, the Austronesian languages, and the Indo-European languages. There might be a few thousand languages spoken natively in Africa, but most of them fall neatly into just a few categories. Nigeria itself has around 500 languages, making it one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. At least 75 of these languages are spoken by a million people or more. Did you know that some linguists place the number of languages of Africa that are spoken as a first language at somewhere between roughly 1,000 and 2,000 (with the most liberal estimates putting that number upwards of 3,000)? This means that perhaps about one-third of the world’s languages can be found in Africa alone. The linguistic diversity of Africa is striking. ![]() Read on to learn more about the languages of Africa, where they’re spoken and who speaks them. The populations peppered throughout the African continent are diverse and heterogeneous, so it only follows that the languages of Africa are just as plentiful and multidimensional as the people who live there. But Africa is a massive continent that comprises all sorts of terrains and topographies - and tongues. If you think of Africa, you might picture it primarily as stretches of savanna or vast swaths of desert with scattered communities of people throughout. ![]()
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