Languages of Africa
There are over 2100, and by some counts over 3000, languages spoken natively in Africa in several
major language families:
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Afro-Asiatic (Hamito-Semitic) spread throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of
Africa, and parts of the Sahel
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Nilo-Saharan is centered on Sudan and Chad
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Niger-Congo (Bantu) covers West, Central, and Southeast Africa
About a hundred of the languages of Africa are widely used for inter-ethnic communication. Arabic,
Berber, Amharic, Somali, Oromo, Swahili, Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba are spoken by tens of millions of
people. If clusters of up to a hundred similar languages are counted together, twelve are spoken by
75 percent and fifteen by 85 percent of Africans as a first or additional language.
Nigeria alone has over 500 languages, one of the greatest concentrations of linguistic diversity in
the world. All African languages are considered official languages of the African Union (AU).
Although many mid-sized languages are used in the media, and in primary-school education, and
some of the larger ones are considered national languages, only a few are official at national level.
Language groups
Most languages spoken in Africa belong to one of three large language families: Afro-Asiatic, NiloSaharan, and Niger-Congo.
Afroasiatic languages
Afroasiatic languages are spoken throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and
parts of the Sahel. There are approximately 375 Afroasiatic languages spoken by over 350 million
people. The Semitic languages are the only branch of the Afroasiatic family of languages that is
spoken outside of Africa.
Some of the most widely spoken Afroasiatic languages include Arabic, Berber, Hausa, Amharic,
Oromo and Somali.
Nilo-Saharan languages
Nilo-Saharan is extremely diverse and thus a somewhat controversial grouping uniting over a
hundred languages from southern Egypt to northern Tanzania and into Nigeria and DR Congo.
Some of the better known Nilo-Saharan languages include Luo, Dinka, and Maasai.
Niger-Congo languages
The Niger-Congo language family is the largest group in Africa, and probably of the world, in terms
of the number of languages. A major branch of Niger-Congo languages is the Bantu family, which
covers a greater geographic area than the rest of the family put together.
Demographics
Of the 1,000 million Africans about 17 percent speak an Arabic dialect. About 10 percent speak
Swahili; about 5 percent speak a Berber dialect; and about 5 percent speak Hausa. Horn of Africa
languages are Amharic, Oromo and Somali. Major South African languages are Zulu and Afrikaans.
English, French, Portuguese and Spanish are important languages in Africa: 130, 115, 20, 10
million Africans speak them as either native or secondary languages. Through sheer demographic
weight, Africans are increasingly taking ownership of these four world languages and having an
ever greater influence on their development and growth.
Language in Africa
African languages have been subject to 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. Another example is the Arab expansion in the 7th century, which
led to the extension of Arabic from its homeland in Asia, into 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. Of particular importance in this respect are
Berber, Hausa (West Africa), Lingala (Congo), Swahili (East Africa), Somali (Horn of Africa) and
Arabic (North Africa, West Africa, and East Africa).
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.
However, in recent years, African countries have become increasingly supportive of maintaining
linguistic diversity.
Official languages
Besides the former colonial languages of English, French, Portuguese and Spanish, the following
languages are official at the national level in some African states:
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Arabic in Algeria, Comoros, Chad, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Somalia,
Sudan, and Tunisia
Berber in Morocco and Algeria
Amharic in Ethiopia
Tigrinya in Eritrea
Somali in Somalia and Djibouti
Setswana in Botswana
Swahili in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda
Kinyarwanda in Rwanda, closely related to Kirundi in Burundi
Kirundi in Burundi
Shona, Sindebele in Zimbabwe
Afrikaans, Nrebele, Xhosa, Zulu, Sepedi, Sesotho, Tswana, Swati, Venda, and Tsonga in
South Africa