Africa how many languages spoken

Thank you for your good and wonderfull work, for my opinion I suggest we Africans must support one language instaed of grab others language. Awesome info. Thank you so much. Please make corrections at Portuguese is actually the working languages of the African Union and the Southern African Development Community.

But it is so amazing this info. And the large majority of Swahili words are of Bantu origin, not Arabic or another language.

Want to enter the African market? There are over African languages in existence so it can be quite mind-boggling trying to nail down which one you should choose to offer your product or service in. The most spoken language in Africa is Swahili which is said to have between and million speakers. Fun Fact? Swahili was the language used in The Lion King.

Amharic is one of the main languages spoken in Ethiopia by over 20 million speakers. It is considered the second most spoken Semitic language in the world after Arabic — these are languages that originate from the Middle East alongside Hebrew, Tigrinya and more. The name Yoruba is also associated with the Yoruba Ethnic Group, which is one of the largest African ethnic groups in the region.

Believe it or not, the Oromos people were forbidden from writing this language between and In fact, it was considered a crime. Later however, Oromo scholars adopted a Latin script and it was then used to teach reading and writing. The Oromo language is actually called Afaan Oromoo.

Hausa uses the Boko and Latin alphabet and it is said to be one of the most advanced languages in Africa as a whole. Hausa is the only Nigerian language that has foreign station broadcasts.

This popular African language is spoken by 20 million people and it has over 20 individual dialects including Owerri, Eche and of course, Central Igbo. Most Igbo speakers are said to be bilingual in English as it is the principal literary language taught in Nigerian schools. One of the most widely spoken languages of South Africa, Zulu is said to be used by over 10 million people.

Part of the Bantu language group, Zulu is very much related to other languages including Xhosa and Ndebele. As a matter of fact, Zulu and Xhosa have such similar dialects, that many wrongly mistake them for being one language.

Most prominently spoken in Zimbabwe along with English, Shona is an African language used by over 10 million people. There are 3 distinct Shona dialects including the Karanga, the Zezuru and the Korekore. There are two different versions of Shona used for different purposes. April 21, With more than 2, distinct languages, Africa has a third of the world's languages with less than a seventh of the world's population.

By comparison, Europe, which has about an eighth of the world's population, has only about languages.

Africa's linguistic diversity can even be found among individual Africans. For instance, a study of inhabitants in a city in western Uganda found that the average speaker knows 4. So why is this anyway? To help explain diversity, linguists borrow tools from evolutionary biologists: linguists explore the relationships between distinct languages in the same way evolutionary biologists explore family relationships and speciation of living things.

Given the parallels in these two fields, it's no coincidence that Africa, the place of highest genetic diversity, contains rich linguistic diversity as well. Population genetics theory predicts that the highest level of diversity exists at the source of the population's origin. For humans, that is Africa. They lost diversity during that migration event. Humanity's African origins has not only led to high genetic diversity on the continent, but it has also helped spur other kinds of variation as well.

There could also be environmental and political explanations, according to University of Chicago evolutionary linguist Salikoko Mufwene. Different choices by political leaders of the past may have then allowed for small languages to survive in Africa while similarly-sized languages died elsewhere. Should Africa be considered the most linguistically diverse continent? It depends on how you define diversity.

Ethnologue, a project to catalogue the world's languages conducted by the religious organization SIL International, created an index of linguistic diversity based on a scale from 0 to 1. Papua New Guinea wins out as the country with the highest index of linguistic diversity at 0. When one looks at the top ten countries, three are part of Oceania but the other seven are on the African continent. Of the 25 most linguistically diverse countries, according to this indexing method, 20 are African, and just below these are others like Ghana and Zambia.

While the numbers are compelling, the data doesn't automatically provide the continent with the title of most language diversity. Researchers don't have to look only at the number of speakers or the size of the geographical area. They can also look at how different languages are related to one another and how they are structured to determine overall linguistic diversity.

In a separate index of diversity sponsored by non-profit Terralingua, investigators Jonathan Loh and David Harmon defined linguistic diversity as the number of languages and the evenness of distribution of mother-tongue speakers among languages in a given geographical area. In this context, it not only matters that a large number of languages are present, but also that one language doesn't overwhelm the others.

Loh says they did not find a strong correlation between the human genetic diversity on the African continent and its linguistic diversity. As Ethnologue data shows, places in Oceania such as Australia and New Guinea contain large numbers of languages over relatively smaller land areas. And there's another reason other continents are able to compete with Africa's high number of languages: less constraint.

With nearly a quarter of the globe's languages considered threatened, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume the continent with 2, living languages is also the region with the highest language loss. But the research points elsewhere. Loh and Harmon also studied loss of linguistic diversity over time. And while the African continent makes up a large proportion of the world's languages, only about 13 percent of African languages are considered threatened.

Meanwhile, in the Pacific region, which includes other areas of high linguistic diversity such as Australia and New Guinea, more than 60 percent of indigenous languages are threatened. 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-Saharan Africa , thereby displacing Khoi-San speaking peoples in much of East Africa. Another example is the Islamic expansion in the 7th century AD, which led to the extension of Arabic to much of North 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 linguae francae.

After gaining independence, many African countries, in the search for national unity, selected one language generally the former colonial language to be used in government and education. In recent years, African countries have become increasingly aware of the importance of linguistic diversity. Language policies that are being developed nowadays are mostly aimed at multilingualism. Besides the former colonial languages of English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, only a few languages are official at the national level.

These are:. The colonial borders established by European powers following the Berlin Conference in divided a great many ethnic groups and African language speaking communities. In a sense, then, "cross-border languages" is a misnomer. Nevertheless it describes the reality of many African languages, which has implications for divergence of language on either side of a border especially when the official languages are different , standards for writing the language, etc.

Language is not static in Africa any more than in other world regions. 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.

Major Northeast African languages are Oromo and Somali. English, French and Portuguese are important languages: , and 20 million speak them as secondary in general. List of major African languages by total number of speakers in million :. Some linguistic features are particularly common among languages spoken in Africa, whereas others seem 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. Phoneme types that are relatively uncommon in African languages include uvular consonants , diphthongs , and front rounded vowels. Tonal languages are found throughout the world but are especially numerous in Africa.

Both the Nilo-Saharan and the Khoi-San phyla are fully tonal. The large majority of the Niger-Congo languages is also tonal. 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, and downstep and downdrift are common in African languages. Widespread syntactical structures include the common use of adjectival verbs and the expression of comparison by means of a verb 'to surpass'. Nilo-Saharan is centered on Sudan and Chad. Khoe is concentrated in the deserts of Namibia and Botswana. Austronesian on Madagascar.

Indo-European on the Southern tip of the continent. Afroasiatic languages Main article: Afroasiatic languages. Main article: Nilo-Saharan languages.

Main article: Niger-Congo languages. Main article: Khoisan languages. See also: List of sign languages Africa. Further information: Demographics of Africa. Sino-African Relations. Entering Africa. Exchanges and Dialogues. Academic Exchanges. The 1st Ministerial Conference.

The 2nd Ministerial Conference.