The languages that fall in this category have some distinct features such as phonology and vowel harmony. The Khoe language group is one of the dominant language groups in the southern section of Africa. The most prominent dialect within this group is the Nama which is spoken in Namibia. Some of the languages within this group are facing the risk of extinction as native speakers opt to use other languages such as English. One of the significant impacts of colonization was the introduction of European languages to Africa which are mainly used as Lingua Franca in many countries.
Languages such as German, English, and French were introduced by the colonial masters to facilitate communication with the conquered communities. Africa is one of the world's most linguistically diverse continents.
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. Also called Afaan Oromoo, this language is spoken by around 30 million people.
Next on our African languages list is Amharic. More than 20 million Ethiopians speak Amharic, making it the third most common language in Africa. One of the most widely spoken Sub Saharan Africa languages over on the eastern side of the continent is Somali. Somali is spoken natively by well over 18 million people and is an official language in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somaliland and Somalia, as well as a recognised minority language in Kenya. Zulu is spoken natively by around 12 million Africans, as well as being used as a second language by some 16 million people.
Also called isiZulu, this language is used in Lesotho and Eswatini as well. The most spoken African language there is Arabic, with other major languages including:. Between them, the countries speak a wide range of languages, with some of the most used including:. Interestingly, Taa, spoken in the Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa, has a reputation as being one of the hardest languages on Earth to learn. You can check out other challenging languages to study by clicking the link below. Some of the most commonly spoken African languages in them include:.
The languages of West Africa that are spoken in them include:. Some of the main African languages spoken in these countries include:. More than African languages are endangered at present and over 50 languages are entirely extinct. Examples of some of these include:. There are plenty of reasons to learn one or more of the different African languages. Businesses wishing to operate on the continent need to deliver their services in the most spoken languages in Africa, as well as in some of the less widely spoken local languages in areas where their company has a presence.
Anyone wishing to travel across Africa would also do well to learn the basics or one or more of the most common languages in Africa, in order to help facilitate their travels. If you are considering learning a new language right now, why not check out the link below to discover 15 of the best languages to learn?
And as with learning any language, there are plenty of associated insights to be gleaned. The intrinsic nature of the link between language and culture means that learning an African language may well deliver a host of cultural insights as part of the process. Read more: 15 Best Languages to Learn. Approximately 1,, different languages are spoken in Africa, including hundreds of ancient African languages and African tribal languages.
However, I hope that the above has helped in terms of:. Post your Comment. Tomedes Translation Services is committed to broadening the horizons of individuals and businesses in the United States and internationally, through the effective use of professional translation services.
Translation Services. Spanning over a land area of The 54 countries in Africa all have a wide range of languages as diverse as their ancestral tribes. But some of these languages are common to every city in this vast land. Swahili, known as Kiswahili in the native tongue, is a Bantu language spoken by some million Africans in the African Great Lakes region in Central and Southern Africa.
Swahili holds quite an appeal for many language learners owing to the wide number of people speaking this language and its rich history. The presence of Arabic in the languages spoken in Africa may come as a surprise to many. Yet Arabic is spoken by more than million Africans, making it one of the biggest languages in the continent.
Read: Most Spoken Languages in Europe. French is a European language that saw the light of Africa after the Colonization period. Not surprisingly, 26 African states form part of the top French-speaking countries on the continent. The fact that it has approximately 90 million speakers in Africa, comes as no big surprise then. Hausa makes to the list of most spoken languages in Africa due to its significance in trade, commerce and business across Nigeria and the West African region.
Besides that, it is one of the few African languages that is taught in International Universities due to the huge amount of literature that it possesses.
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