The 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,[1] and by some counts at over 3,000.[2]Nigeria alone has over 500 languages (according to
SIL Ethnologue),[3] one of the greatest concentrations of linguistic diversity in the world. The languages of Africa belong to many distinct
language families, among which the largest are:
Around a hundred languages are widely used for interethnic communication. These include
Arabic,
Somali,
Amharic,
Oromo,
Igbo,
Swahili,
Hausa,
Manding,
Fulani and
Yoruba, which are spoken as a second (or non-first) language by millions of people. Although many African 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. In Sub-Saharan Africa, most official languages at the national level tend to be colonial languages such as French, Portuguese, or English.[4][5][6]
The
African Union declared 2006 the "Year of African Languages".[7]
The earliest Afroasiatic languages are associated with the
Capsian culture, the Saharan languages are linked with the Khartoum Mesolithic/Neolithic cultures. Niger-Congo languages are correlated with the west and central African
hoe-based farming traditions and the Khoisan languages are matched with the south and southeastern Wilton industries.[8]
Some of the most widely spoken Afroasiatic languages include
Arabic (a Semitic language, and a recent arrival from West Asia),
Somali (Cushitic),
Berber (Berber),
Hausa (Chadic),
Amharic (Semitic) and
Oromo (Cushitic). Of the world's surviving language families, Afroasiatic has the longest written history, as both the
Akkadian language of Mesopotamia and
Ancient Egyptian are members.
Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed grouping of some one hundred diverse languages. Genealogical linkage between these languages has failed to be conclusively demonstrated, and support for the proposal is sparse among linguists.[10][11] The languages share some unusual
morphology, but if they are related, most of the branches must have undergone major restructuring since diverging from their common ancestor.
The
Niger–Congo languages constitute the largest language family spoken in
West Africa and perhaps the world in terms of the number of languages. One of its salient features is an elaborate
noun class system with grammatical
concord. A large majority of languages of this family are
tonal such as
Yoruba and
Igbo,
Akan and
Ewe language. A major branch of Niger–Congo languages is the
Bantu phylum, which has a wider speech area than the rest of the family (see Niger–Congo B (Bantu) in the map above).
The
Niger–Kordofanian language family, joining Niger–Congo with the
Kordofanian languages of south-central
Sudan, was proposed in the 1950s by
Joseph Greenberg. Today, linguists often use "Niger–Congo" to refer to this entire family, including Kordofanian as a subfamily. One reason for this is that it is not clear whether Kordofanian was the first branch to diverge from rest of Niger–Congo.
Mande has been claimed to be equally or more divergent. Niger–Congo is generally accepted by linguists, though a few question the inclusion of Mande and
Dogon, and there is no conclusive evidence for the inclusion of
Ubangian.
Other language families
Several languages spoken in Africa belong to language families concentrated or originating outside the African continent.
Austronesian
Malagasy belongs to the
Austronesian languages and is the westernmost branch of the family. It is the national and co-official language of
Madagascar, and a Malagasy dialect called
Bushi is also spoken in
Mayotte.
The ancestors of the Malagasy people migrated to Madagascar around 1,500 years ago from Southeast Asia, more specifically the island of Borneo. The origins of how they arrived to Madagascar remains a mystery, however the Austronesians are known for their seafaring culture. Despite the geographical isolation, Malagasy still has strong resemblance to
Barito languages especially the
Ma'anyan language of southern Borneo.
With more than 20 million speakers, Malagasy is one of the most widely spoken of the Austronesian languages.
The three small
Khoisan families of southern Africa have not been shown to be closely related to any other major language family. In addition, there are various other families that have not been demonstrated to belong to one of these families. The classifications below follow
Glottolog.
Mande, some 70 languages, including the major languages of
Mali and
Guinea; these are generally thought to be divergent Niger–Congo, but debate persists
Khoisan is a term of convenience covering some 30 languages spoken by around 300,000–400,000 people. There are five Khoisan families that have not been shown to be related to each other:
Khoe,
Tuu and
Kx'a, which are found mainly in
Namibia and
Botswana, as well as
Sandawe and
Hadza of
Tanzania, which are
language isolates. A striking feature of Khoisan languages, and the reason they are often grouped together, is their use of
click consonants. Some neighbouring Bantu languages (notably
Xhosa and
Zulu) have clicks as well, but these were adopted from Khoisan languages. The Khoisan languages are also
tonal.
A fair number of
unclassified languages are reported in Africa. Many remain unclassified simply for lack of data; among the better-investigated ones that continue to resist easy classification are:
Of these,
Jalaa is perhaps the most likely to be an isolate.
Less-well investigated languages include
Irimba,
Luo,
Mawa,
Rer Bare (possibly Bantu),
Bete (evidently Jukunoid),
Bung (unclear),
Kujarge (evidently Chadic),
Lufu (Jukunoid),
Meroitic (possibly Afroasiatic),
Oropom (possibly spurious) and
Weyto (evidently Cushitic). Several of these are extinct, and adequate comparative data is thus unlikely to be forthcoming. Hombert & Philippson (2009)[17] list a number of African languages that have been classified as
language isolates at one point or another. Many of these are simply unclassified, but Hombert & Philippson believe Africa has about twenty language families, including isolates. Beside the possibilities listed above, there are:
Many African countries have national sign languages, such as
Algerian Sign Language,
Tunisian Sign Language,
Ethiopian Sign Language. Other sign languages are restricted to small areas or single villages, such as
Adamorobe Sign Language in
Ghana. Tanzania has seven, one for each of its schools for the Deaf, all of which are discouraged. Not much is known, since little has been published on these languages
Throughout the long multilingual history of the African continent, African languages have been subject to phenomena like language contact, language expansion, language shift and language death. A case in point is the
Bantu expansion, in which Bantu-speaking peoples expanded over most of
Sub-Equatorial Africa, intermingling with Khoi-San speaking peoples from much of
Southeast Africa and
Southern Africa and other peoples from
Central Africa. Another example is the Arab expansion in the 7th century, which led to the extension of
Arabic from its homeland in Asia, into much of North Africa and the Horn of Africa.
Trade languages are another age-old phenomenon in the African linguistic landscape. Cultural and linguistic innovations spread along trade routes and languages of peoples dominant in trade developed into languages of wider communication (
lingua franca). Of particular importance in this respect are
Berber (North and West Africa),
Jula (western West Africa),
Fulfulde (West Africa),
Hausa (West Africa),
Lingala (Congo),
Swahili (Southeast Africa),
Somali (Horn of Africa) and
Arabic (North Africa and Horn of Africa).
After gaining independence, many African countries, in the search for national unity, selected one language, generally the former Indo-European colonial language, to be used in government and education. However, in recent years, African countries have become increasingly supportive of maintaining linguistic diversity. Language policies that are being developed nowadays are mostly aimed at multilingualism. This presents a methodological complication when collecting data in Africa and limited literature exists. An analysis of
Afrobarometerpublic opinion survey data of 36 countries suggested that survey interviewers and respondents could engage in various linguistic behaviors, such as
code-switching during the survey.[19] Moreover, some African countries have been considering removing their official former Indo-European colonial languages, like
Mali and
Burkina Faso which removed French as an official language in 2024.[20][21]
The colonial borders established by European powers following the
Berlin Conference in 1884–1885 divided a great many ethnic groups and African language speaking communities. This can cause divergence of a language on either side of a border (especially when the official languages are different), for example, in orthographic standards. Some notable cross-border languages include
Berber (which stretches across much of North Africa and some parts of West Africa),
Kikongo (that stretches across northern Angola, western and coastal Democratic Republic of the Congo, and western and coastal Republic of the Congo),
Somali (stretches across most of the Horn of Africa), Swahili (spoken in the African Great Lakes region),
Fula (in the Sahel and West Africa) and
Luo (in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, South Sudan and Sudan).
Language is not static in Africa any more than on other continents.[citation needed] In addition to the (likely modest) impact of borders, there are also cases of
dialect levelling (such as in
Igbo and probably many others),
koinés (such as
N'Ko and possibly
Runyakitara) and emergence of new dialects (such as
Sheng). In some countries, there are official efforts to develop
standardized language versions.
There are also many less widely spoken languages that may be considered
endangered languages.
French, English and Portuguese are important languages in Africa. About 320 million,[35][36] 240 million and 35 million Africans, respectively, speak them as either native or secondary languages. Portuguese has become the national language of Angola and São Tomé and Príncipe, and Portuguese is the official language of Mozambique. The economies of Angola and Mozambique are quickly becoming economic powerhouses in Africa.[37]
Linguistic features
Some linguistic features are particularly common among languages spoken in Africa, whereas others are less common. Such shared traits probably are not due to a common origin of all African languages. Instead, some may be due to
language contact (resulting in borrowing) and specific idioms and phrases may be due to a similar cultural background.
Phonological
Some widespread phonetic features include:
certain types of consonants, such as
implosives (/ɓa/),
ejectives (/kʼa/), the
labiodental flap and in southern Africa,
clicks (/ǂa/, /ᵑǃa/). True implosives are rare outside Africa, and clicks and the flap almost unheard of.
doubly articulated
labial-velar stops like /k͡pa/ and /ɡ͡ba/ are found in places south of the Sahara.
prenasalized consonants, like /mpa/ and /ŋɡa/, are widespread in Africa but not common outside it.
sequences of stops and fricatives at the beginnings of words, such as /fsa/, /pta/ and /dt͡sk͡xʼa/.
nasal stops which only occur with nasal vowels, such as [ba] vs. [mã] (but both [pa] and [pã]), especially in West Africa.
Tonal languages are found throughout the world but are especially common in Africa - in fact, there are far more tonal than non-tonal languages in Africa. Both the Nilo-Saharan and the Khoi-San phyla are fully tonal. The large majority of the Niger–Congo languages are also tonal. Tonal languages are also found in the Omotic, Chadic and South & East Cushitic branches of Afroasiatic. The most common type of tonal system opposes two tone levels, High (H) and Low (L).
Contour tones do occur, and can often be analysed as two or more tones in succession on a single syllable. Tone melodies play an important role, meaning that it is often possible to state significant generalizations by separating tone sequences ("melodies") from the segments that bear them.
Tonal sandhi processes like tone spread, tone shift, downstep and downdrift are common in African languages.
Syntactic
Widespread syntactical structures include the common use of adjectival verbs and the expression of comparison by means of a verb 'to surpass'. The Niger–Congo languages have large numbers of genders (
noun classes) which cause agreement in verbs and other words.
Case,
tense and other categories may be distinguished only by tone. Auxiliary verbs are also widespread among African languages; the fusing of subject markers and TAM/polarity auxiliaries into what are known as tense pronouns are more common in auxiliary verb constructions in African languages than in most other parts of the world.[38]
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.[citation needed]
Demographics
The following is a table displaying the number of speakers of given languages within Africa:
^Epstein, Edmund L.; Kole, Robert, eds. (1998).
The Language of African Literature. Africa World Press. p. ix.
ISBN0-86543-534-0. Retrieved 23 June 2011. Africa is incredibly rich in language—over 3,000 indigenous languages by some counts, and many creoles, pidgins, and lingua francas.
^Ehret, Christopher (2000).
"Language and History". In Heine, Bernd; Nurse, Derek (eds.). African Languages: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 290.
ISBN0-521-66629-5. Retrieved 12 March 2018.
^Campbell, Lyle; Mixco, Mauricio J. (2007). A Glossary of Historical Linguistics. University of Utah Press.
ISBN9780874808926.
^Pithouse, Kathleen; Mitchell, Claudia; Moletsane, Relebohile (16 December 2023). Making Connections: Self-Study & Social Action. Peter Lang. p. 91.
ISBN9781433105012.
^Heese, J. A. (1971). Die herkoms van die Afrikaner, 1657–1867 [The origin of the Afrikaner, 1657–1867] (in Afrikaans). Cape Town: A. A. Balkema.
OCLC1821706.
OL5361614M.
^Heeringa, Wilbert; de Wet, Febe (2007). "The origin of Afrikaans pronunciation: a comparison to west Germanic languages and Dutch dialects".
CiteSeerX10.1.1.222.5044.
^Coetzee, Abel (1948).
Standaard Afrikaans(PDF). Afrikaner Pers. Retrieved 17 September 2014.
^
abcdefghijklmn"JOURNAL OFFICIEL DE LA REPUBLIQUE DU MALI"(PDF). sgg-mali.ml. 29 September 2017. Retrieved 26 July 2023. Langues nationales : langues considérées comme propres à une nation ou à un pays. Selon la Loi n°96- 049 du 23 août 1996, les langues nationales du Mali sont : le bamanankan (bambara), le bomu (bobo), le bozo (bozo), le dTgTsT (dogon), le fulfulde (peul), le hasanya (maure), le mamara (miniyanka), le maninkakan (malinké) le soninke (sarakolé), le soKoy (songhoï), le syenara (sénoufo), le tamasayt (tamasheq), le xaasongaxanKo (khassonké).
^According to article 7 of
The Transitional Federal Charter of the Somali RepublicArchived 18 December 2008 at the
Wayback Machine: "The official languages of the Somali Republic shall be Somali (Maay and Maxaatiri) and Arabic. The second languages of the Transitional Federal Government shall be English and Italian".
^Brenzinger, Matthias (2011).
"The twelve modern Khoisan languages". In Witzlack-Makarevich, Alena; Ernszt, Martina (eds.). Khoisan languages and linguistics: proceedings of the 3rd International Symposium, Riezlern / Kleinwalsertal. QKF Research in Khoisan Studies. Vol. 29. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. p. 2.
ISBN978-3-89645-873-5.
^Mannan, Nuraddin (31 May 2006).
"Memories of Utopia- Infoshop, World Bank"(PDF). Archived from
the original(PDF) on 6 April 2012. Retrieved 14 October 2015. There is no exact census for the Nubian population but some researchers estimate their number in Sudan for about 5 millions and about three millions in Egypt.
^Shoup, John A. (2011). Ethnic Groups of Africa and the Middle East. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. p. 333.
ISBN978-1-59884-363-7. The Zaghawa is one of the major divisions of the Beri peoples who live in western Sudan and eastern Chad, and their language, also called Zaghawa, belongs to the Saharan branch of the Nilo-Saharan language group.
Childs, George Tucker (2003). An Introduction to African Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamin.
ISBN9781588114211.
OCLC52766015.
Chimhundu, Herbert (2002).
Language Policies in Africa(PDF). Intergovernmental Conference on Language Policies in Africa (Revised ed.). Harare: UNESCO. Archived from
the original(PDF) on 16 May 2017.
Ellis, Stephen, ed. (1996). Africa Now: People, Policies, and Institutions. Ministry of Foreign Affairs (DGIS).
ISBN9780435089870.
Elugbe, Ben (1998). "Cross-border and major languages of Africa". In Legère, K. (ed.). Cross-border Languages: Reports and Studies, Regional Workshop on Cross-Border Languages, National Institute for Educational Development (NIED), Okahandja, 23–27 September 1996. Windhoek: Gamsberg Macmillan.
Ethnologue.com's
Africa: A listing of African languages and language families.
Greenberg, Joseph H. (1983). "Some areal characteristics of African languages". In Dihoff, Ivan R. (ed.). Current Approaches to African Linguistics. Publications in African Languages and Linguistics. Vol. 1. Dordrecht: Foris. pp. 3–21.
Greenberg, Joseph H. (1966). The Languages of Africa (2nd ed.). Bloomington: Indiana University.
Heine, Bernd; Nurse, Derek, eds. (2000). African Languages: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Webb, Vic; Kembo-Sure, eds. (1998). African Voices: An Introduction to the Languages and Linguistics of Africa. Cape Town: Oxford University Press Southern Africa.
Westphal, E.O.J. (1963). "The Linguistic Prehistory of Southern Africa: Bush, Kwadi, Hottentot, and Bantu Linguistic Relationships". Africa. 33 (3): 237–265.
doi:
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JSTOR1157418.
S2CID143635864.