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800 to 1,000 languages
- The 800 to 1,000 languages spoken in Africa today can be grouped into four families, or groups of languages thought to have common origins—Hamito-Semitic, or Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo-Kordofanian, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan.
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Language groups. Clickable map showing the traditional language families, subfamilies and major languages spoken in Africa. Most languages natively spoken in Africa belong to one of the two large language families that dominate the continent: Afroasiatic, or Niger–Congo.
- Arabic
- Berber
- Hausa
Arabic is a Semitic language spoken by 150 million people in Africa, making it the most widely spoken language on the continent. Arabic speakers in Africa account for 62% of the total Arabic speakers in the world. It is recognized as the official language in countries in North and Sib-Saharan Africa including Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania, Erit...
Berber is an Afro-Asiatic language made up of twenty-six closely related languages. It is spoken by approximately 56 million people, making it the second most commonly spoken language in Africa. Berber is widely spoken in North African countries like Morocco and Algeria, which account for the highest number of standard Berber speakers. It is also w...
Hausa is the third most commonly spoken language in Africa and includes more than 34 million native speakers. It is a branch of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages, and is widely spoken as a first and second language in Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, where it originated from the Kano dialect. Hausa is also widely used as a business ...
- Arabic. Number of speakers: Over 300 million. Example phrase: السلام عليك [as-salām ‘alaykum] (May peace be with you) If you decide to learn Arabic, you’ll probably get more bang for your buck than you even thought possible.
- French. Number of speakers: 120 million in Africa. Example phrase: Bonjour (Good day) French can get you pretty far in many African countries, especially in North, West and Central Africa, where a number of countries were French colonies in the past.
- Swahili. Number of speakers: Over 100 million. Example phrase: Hujambo (Greeting) Swahili, known as Kiswahili in the language itself, is a Bantu language widely spoken in the African Great Lakes region, which comprises a huge swath of Central, Southern and East Africa.
- Hausa. Number of speakers: 63 million. Example phrase: Sannu (Hello) Hausa is spoken primarily in Nigeria and Niger, but it’s also spoken by plenty of other people in West Africa.
List of official, national and spoken languages of Africa. Africa is a continent with a very high linguistic diversity, there are an estimated 1500-2000 African languages. gathering appoximately 140 languages with some eleven millions speakers scattered in Central and Eastern Africa.
With anywhere between 1000 and 2000 languages, Africa is home to approximately one-third of the world's languages. The diversity of Africa's languages is evidenced by their populations. In total, there are at least 75 languages in Africa which have more than one million speakers. The rest are spoken by populations ranging from a few hundred to ...
Jan 31, 2023 · 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.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 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, and by some counts at over 3,000.
