How Many Languages are Spoken in Africa?

It is hard to determine how many different languages are spoken in Africa simply because it is difficult to tell is a language is unique or simply the same but spoken in a different dialect. To date, most experts have agreed, there are about 2000 different African languages.

How many languages are there in Africa? Asked by sister1 50 months ago Similar questions: languages Africa Education & Reference > Languages.

There are an estimated 2000 languages spoken in Africa. Languages of AfricaFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaThe Languages of Africa are a diverse set of languages, many of which bear little relation to one another. European language has a great deal of influence due to the recent history of colonization. There are an estimated 2000 languages spoken in Africa.1 African languages such as Swahili, Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba, are spoken by millions of people.

Others, such as Laal, Shabo, and Dahalo, are spoken by a few hundred or fewer. In addition, Africa has a wide variety of sign languages, many of whose genetic classification has yet to be worked out. Several African languages are also whistled for special purposes.

The abundant linguistic diversity of many African countries has made language policy an extremely important issue in the neo-colonial era. In recent years, African countries have become increasingly aware of the value of their linguistic inheritance. Language policies that are being developed nowadays are mostly aimed at multilingualism.

For example, all African languages are considered official languages of the African Union (AU). 2006 was declared by AU as the "Year of African Languages".2Contents * 1 Language families o 1.1 Afro-Asiatic o 1.2 Nilo-Saharan o 1.3 Niger-Congo o 1.4 Khoi-San o 1.5 Non-African families o 1.6 Creole languages o 1.7 Unclassified languages o 1.8 Sign languages * 2 Language in Africa o 2.1 Cross-border languages o 2.2 Language change & planning * 3 Linguistic features * 4 See also o 4. 1 Major works o 4.

2 Major figures in the study and classification of African languages o 4.3 Related topics * 5 References o 5.1 African languages o 5.2 Language policies in Africa o 5.3 Classifications * 6 Notes * 7 External linksedit Language familiesMost African languages belong to one of four language families: Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo, and Khoisan. A handful of languages associated with the continent are Indo-European or Austronesian, however, their presence dates to less than 500 and 1000 years ago, respectively, and their closest linguistic relatives are primarily non-African.In addition, African languages include several unclassified languages, and also sign languages. Edit Afro-Asiatic Main article: Afro-Asiatic languagesFormerly known as Hamito-Semitic languages, Afro-Asiatic languages are spoken in large parts of North Africa, East Africa, and Southwest Asia.

The Afro-Asiatic language family comprises approximately 375 languages spoken by 285 million people. The main subfamilies of Afro-Asiatic are the Semitic languages, the Cushitic languages, Berber, and the Chadic languages. The Semitic languages are the only branch of Afro-Asiatic located outside of Africa.Some of the most widely spoken Afro-Asiatic languages include Arabic (Semitic), Amharic (Semitic), Oromo (Cushitic), and Hausa (Chadic).

Of all the world's surviving language families, Afro-Asiatic has the longest written history, since both Ancient Egyptian and Akkadian are members. Edit Nilo-Saharan Main article: Nilo-Saharan languagesThe Nilo-Saharan languages includes an array of diverse languages, a categorisation that is not entirely agreed upon. They mainly include languages spoken in Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, and northern Tanzania.

Some languages in Central and West African are also classified as Nilo-Saharan. The family consists of more than a hundred languages. Nilo-Saharan languages are often sub-divided into Komuz languages, Saharan languages (including Kanuri language, Songhay languages, Fur languages (including Fur language), Maban languages, Central Sudanic languages, Kunama language, Berta language, Eastern Sudanic languages.

Eastern Sudanic languages are subdivided into Nubian languages and Nilotic languages. Nilotic languages include Eastern Nilotic languages, Southern Nilotic languages and Western Nilotic languagesNilo-Saharan languages include an array of languages, including Luo languages in Sudan, Uganda,Kenya and Tanzania (eg. Acholi, Lango, Dholuo), Ateker in Uganda and Kenya (eg.

Teso, Karamojong and Turkana), Maasai (Kenya and Tanzania), Kalenjin (Kenya), Kanuri (Nigeria, Niger, Chad) and Songhay (Mali, Niger). Most Nilo-Saharan languages are tonal. The Kadu languages were formerly grouped with the Kordofanian languages, but are nowadays often considered part of the Nilo-Saharan family.

The Nilotic languages, having expanded substantially with the Nilotic peoples in recent centuries, are a geographically widespread language family and have a large population. Edit Niger-Congo Main article: Niger-Congo languagesThe Niger-Congo language family is the largest group of Africa (and probably of the world) in terms of different languages. One of its salient features, still shared by most of the Niger-Congo languages, is the noun class system.

The vast majority of languages of this family is tonal. The Bantu family comprises a major branch of Niger-Congo, as visualized by the distinction between Niger-Congo A and B (Bantu) on the map above. The Niger-Kordofanian language family, joining Niger-Congo with the Kordofanian languages of south-central Sudan, was proposed in 1950s by Joseph Greenberg.

It is common today for linguists to 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. Mandé has been claimed to be equally or more divergent.

Niger-Congo is generally accepted by linguists, though a few question the inclusion of Kordofanian or Mandé. Edit Khoi-San Main article: Khoisan languagesThe Khoi-San languages number about 50, and are spoken by about 120,000 people. They are found mainly in Namibia, Botswana, and Angola.

Two distant languages usually considered Khoi-San are Sandawe and Hadza of Tanzania. Many linguists regard the Khoi-San phylum as a yet unproven hypothesis. A striking — and nearly unique — characteristic of the Khoi-San languages is their use of click consonants.

Some neighbouring Bantu languages (notably Xhosa and Zulu) have adopted some click sounds from the Khoi-San languages, as has the Cushitic language Dahalo; but only a single language, the Australian ritual language Damin, is reported to use clicks without being a result of Khoi-San influence. All of the Khoi-San languages are tonal. Edit Non-African familiesThe above are families indigenous to Africa. Several African languages belong to non-African families: Malagasy, the most common language of Madagascar, is an Austronesian language, and Afrikaans is Indo-European, as is the lexifier of most African creoles.

Since the colonial era, European languages like Portuguese, English and French (African French) are also found on the African continent (all are official languages), as are Indian languages such as Gujarati. Other Indo-European languages have also been heard in various parts of the continent in earlier historical times, such as Old Persian and Greek (in Egypt), Latin (in North Africa), and Modern Persian (in settlements along the Indian Ocean). Edit Creole languagesDue partly to its multilingualism and its colonial past, a substantial proportion of the world's creole languages are to be found in Africa. Some are based on European languages (eg Krio from English in Sierra Leone and the very similar Pidgin in Cameroon and Nigeria, Cape Verdean Creole in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau Creole in Guinea-Bissau and Senegal both from Portuguese, Seychellois Creole from French in the Seychelles, or Mauritian Creole in Mauritius); some are based on Arabic (e.g. , Juba Arabic in the southern Sudan, or Nubi in parts of Uganda and Kenya); some are based on local languages (e.g. , Sango, the main language of the Central African Republic.

)edit Unclassified languagesA fair number of unclassified languages are reported in Africa; many remain unclassified simply for lack of data, but among the better-investigated ones may be listed: * possibly Afro-Asiatic: Ongota * possibly Nilo-Saharan: Shabo * possibly Niger-Congo: Laal and Jalaa. Less well investigated ones include Bete, Bung, Kujarge, Lufu, Mpre, Oropom, and Weyto. Several of these are extinct, and adequate comparative data is thus unlikely to be forthcoming.

In addition, the placement of Kadu, Kordofanian, Hadza, and Sandawe - among others - is controversial, as discussed above. Edit Sign languages See also: List of sign languages#AfricaMany African countries have national sign languages - such as Algerian Sign Language, Tunisian Sign Language, Ethiopian Sign Language - while other sign languages are restricted to small areas or single villages, such as Adamorobe Sign Language in Ghana. Little has been published on most of these languages since not much is known.

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_languages .

1000 - 1500 African languages Languages indigenous to Africa that belong to the Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, Khoisan, and Afro-Asiatic language phyla. Africa is the most polyglot continent; estimates of the number of African languages range from 1,000 to more than 1,500. Many have numerous dialects.

Distinctions in tone play a significant role in nearly all sub-Saharan languages. Contact between people who do not speak the same language has necessitated the development of lingua francas such as Swahili in East Africa, Lingala in the Congo River basin (see Bantu languages), Sango in the Central African Republic (see Adamawa-Ubangi languages), and Arabic across much of the Sahel. African languages, geographic rather than linguistic classification of languages spoken on the African continent.

Storically the term refers to the languages of sub-Saharan Africa, which do not belong to a single family, but are divided among several distinct linguistic stocks. It is estimated that more than 800 languages are spoken in Africa; however, they belong to comparatively few language families. Some 50 African languages have more than half a million speakers each, but many others are spoken by relatively few people.

Tonality is a common feature of indigenous African languages. There are usually two or three tones (based on pitch levels rather than the rising and falling in inflections of Chinese tones) used to indicate semantic or grammatical distinction. In the last few decades great strides have been made in the study and classification of the African languages, although the results are still far from definitive.

The principal linguistic families of Africa are now generally said to be Afroasiatic; Niger-Kordofanian (including Niger-Congo); Nilo-Saharan; and Khoisan, or Click; two other stocks, Indo-European and Malayo-Polynesian, are also represented. Niger-Kordofanian and Nilo-Saharan are two large families of languages spoken exclusively in Africa. These languages are spoken in all parts of the continent, from the extreme south up to the territory of the Afroasiatic languages of N Africa. The Afroasiatic family is also spoken in the Middle East. Some authorities believe that the languages spoken in the Niger-Kordofanian and Nilo-Saharan families are sufficiently similar to suggest that both stocks had the same ancestor language.

Niger-Kordofanian The Niger-Kordofanian family has two branches, Niger-Congo and Kordofanian. The Kordofanian tongues are spoken in Sudan and form five small groups (Koalib, Tegali, Talodi, Tumtum, and Katla). Niger-Congo is an enormous branch whose languages are found throughout S and central Africa and in most of W Africa below the Sahara.It is generally subdivided into six groups: West Atlantic; Mande; Gur, or Voltaic; Kwa; Benue-Congo; and Adamawa-Eastern.

The West Atlantic branch includes many languages, among them Wolof (in Senegal), Temne (in Sierra Leone), and Fulani, the tongue of several million people inhabiting an area from Senegal to a region E of Lake Chad. The Mande group consists of languages prevalent in the Niger valley, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, such as Mende in Liberia and Malinke in Mali. Gur, or Voltaic, is made up of several language groups and includes Mossi, the dominant tongue of Burkina Faso, as well as the Dagomba and Mamprusi of N Ghana.

The Kwa languages, spoken chiefly in Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Nigeria, and Liberia, include Ewe, Yoruba, Igbo, Nupe, Bini, Ashanti, and possibly Ijo (which is sometimes considered a separate branch). Benue-Congo includes the huge Bantu group of hundreds of tongues found throughout central and S Africa (see Bantu languages), as well as such non-Bantu languages as Tiv, Jukun, and Efik, which are spoken in Nigeria and Cameroon. The Adamawa-Eastern branch, to which Banda, Zande, and Sango belong, is composed of a number of languages spoken in Nigeria, Cameroon, and an area north of the Bantu territory to Sudan.

A characteristic feature of most of the Niger-Congo languages is the use of tones. Case inflection is entirely lacking, and gender marking is almost unknown in the Niger-Congo family. The verb root tends to remain unchanged; moods and tenses are denoted either by particles or by auxiliary verbs.

For example, in a number of languages the infinitival is the auxiliary designating the future. Typical of the Niger-Kordofanian stock as a whole is the division of nouns, which has been compared to the gender system of the Indo-European tongues. However, Indo-European features only three classifications (masculine, feminine, and neuter), whereas some of the Niger-Kordofanian languages have as many as 20 noun classes.

One class, for example, designates human beings, another is used for liquids, and a third class is used for animals. Each class has its own pair of affixes to indicate the singular and the plural. Nilo-Saharan The Nilo-Saharan language stock has six branches: Songhai (spoken in Mali), Saharan (including languages spoken both near Lake Chad, as in Kanuri, and in central Sahara), Maban (a group of tongues found E of Lake Chad), Furian (comprising only Fur, an important language of Sudan), Koman (a group of languages of Ethiopia and Sudan), and Chari-Nile, the principal branch of Nilo-Saharan, composed of the Eastern Sudanic languages, the Central Sudanic languages, and two additional tongues, Kunama and Berta; the Chari-Nile tongues are spoken in Sudan, Congo (Kinshasa), Uganda, Cameroon, Chad, the Central African Republic, Kenya, mainland Tanzania, and Ethiopia.

The Eastern Sudanic subdivision of Chari-Nile itself has ten branches, the two most important of which are Nubian and Nilotic, both found in Sudan. Nubian is unique among modern African languages in that it has written texts of the medieval period. The Nilotic tongues include Shilluk, Dinka, Nuer, Masai, Turkana, Nandi, and Suk.

The Central Sudanic subdivision of Chari-Nile consists of a number of languages, among them Mangbetu, spoken in Congo (Kinshasa), and Efe, used by the pygmies. Like the Niger-Congo languages, most of the Nilo-Saharan languages use tones; some Nilo-Saharan tongues inflect their nouns according to case, and still others have gender. The verb in many Nilo-Saharan languages has a system of verb derivation.

Khoisan The Khoisan, or Click, linguistic family is made up of three branches: the Khoisan languages of the San (Bushmen) and Khoikhoi, spoken in various parts of sub-Saharan Africa; Sandawe, a language found in E Africa; and Hatsa (Hadzane or Hadzapi), also spoken in E Africa. Although all the Khoisan languages use click sounds, Sandawe and Hatsa are unlike the other Khoisan tongues and are not related to each other. All of the Khoisan languages appear to use tones to distinguish meanings, and the Khoikhoi languages and some of the San languages inflect the noun to show case, number, and gender. The outstanding characteristic of the Khoisan tongues, however, is their extensive use of click sounds.

(Examples of click sounds familiar to speakers of English are the interjection tsk-tsk and the click used to signal to a horse. ) Click sounds, which are found only in Africa as parts of words, involve a sucking action by the tongue, but the position of the tongue and the way in which air is released into the mouth vary, just as in the formation of other sounds; thus clicks may be dental, palatal, alveolar, lateral, labial, or retroflex; voiced, voiceless, or nasal; aspirated or glottal. Six types of clicks are known for the San languages as a whole, although no single tongue has all of them.

The Khoikhoi languages have dental, palatal, retroflex, and lateral clicks. Some Bantu languages, notably Zulu and Xhosa, which are spoken near the Khoisan area, have borrowed click sounds from the Khoisan languages. Indo-European and Malayo-Polynesian Indo-European tongues used in Africa include Afrikaans and English (native to many people in the Republic of South Africa and Zimbabwe).

African Americans coming to Liberia in the 19th cent. Introduced English there, and repatriated slaves who settled in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in the 19th cent. Used a form of pidgin English, from which a creole English (now called Krio) developed.

A form of creole Portuguese is current in Guinea-Bissau. Many other African lands employ European languages, particularly French, Portuguese, and English, which are often used in schools and in government as a second language. The Malayo-Polynesian family is represented by Malagasy, which is spoken on the island of Madagascar.

Twentieth-Century Developments Most of the Niger-Kordofanian and Nilo-Saharan languages still have no writing (except perhaps for translations of the Bible), although there are several important exceptions. The Nilo-Saharan tongue Nubian, the only modern African language with early written records (dating from the 8th cent.A.D.To the 14th cent.), is of considerable linguistic interest. Its alphabet was derived from that of Coptic.

Swahili, a Bantu tongue of the Niger-Kordofanian stock, was written before the European conquest of Africa (see Swahili language), and Vai, a language belonging to the Mande subdivision of Niger-Congo, employs an indigenous script developed in the 19th cent. Because the majority of Africans do not know a European tongue, the use of written African languages has become increasingly important for the growing field of mass communication. Arabic and Roman letters are now being used increasingly for languages of the Niger-Kordofanian and Nilo-Saharan stocks, and the International African Institute has had some success in promoting the use of the written form of indigenous African languages.

Many newspapers, magazines, and radio broadcasts now employ various vernaculars, and film theaters can switch sound tracks to accommodate the audience in a given language area. However, Africa’s linguistic diversity can be a hindrance to mass communication, and European tongues (especially English and French) are still widely used in the media. The modern scientific study of the classification and distribution of African languages has thrown some light on the history of Africa and its inhabitants.

More knowledge can be expected from the combined use in the future of evidence from linguistic sources, historical records, reliable traditions, and archaeology. For example, the study of loan words from languages such as Greek, Latin, Punic, Arabic, and Portuguese should reveal much about contacts between African and non-African cultures. The study of loan words of African origin that have been absorbed by English has become of increasing interest to American linguists and scholars.

Sources: E.A. Gregersen, ed. , Language in Africa (1977); M. Mann and D.

Dalby A Thesaurus of African Languages (1987)..

Estimates are 2000-3000, with up to 8000 dialects.. "It is estimated that there are between 2000 and 3000 languages spoken on the African continent, with possibly as many as 8000 dialects. African languages are divided into four major language families, as well as Austronesian. These are shown in the image on the right" Follow this link for that map and much more information: africanlanguages.com/" rel="nofollow">africanlanguages.com/ Sources: africanlanguages.com/" rel="nofollow">africanlanguages.com/ .

" "how do you say "Cheers" in other languages?" "How to say 'Live Life" in other languages.

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