Languages of Africa
[2] Nigeria alone has over 500 languages (according to SIL Ethnologue),[3] one of the greatest concentrations of linguistic diversity in the world.
These include Arabic, Swahili, Amharic, Oromo, Igbo, Somali, Hausa, Manding, Fulani and Yoruba, which are spoken as a second (or non-first) language by millions of people.
The main subfamilies of Afroasiatic are Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Omotic, Egyptian and Semitic.
[9] Some of the most widely spoken Afroasiatic languages include Arabic (a Semitic language, and a recent arrival from West Asia), Somali (Cushitic), Berber (Berber), Hausa (Chadic), Amharic (Semitic) and Oromo (Cushitic).
Genealogical linkage between these languages has failed to be conclusively demonstrated, and support for the proposal is sparse among linguists.
[10][11] The languages share some unusual morphology, but if they are related, most of the branches must have undergone major restructuring since diverging from their common ancestor.
The inclusion of the Songhay languages is questionable, and doubts have been raised over the Koman, Gumuz and Kadu branches.
[citation needed] Some of the better known Nilo-Saharan languages are Kanuri, Fur, Songhay, Nobiin and the widespread Nilotic family, which includes the Luo, Dinka and Maasai.
[citation needed] One of its salient features is an elaborate noun class system with grammatical concord.
It is the national and co-official language of Madagascar, and a Malagasy dialect called Bushi is also spoken in Mayotte.
The ancestors of the Malagasy people migrated to Madagascar around 1,500 years ago from Southeast Asia, more specifically the island of Borneo.
Afrikaans evolved from the Dutch vernacular[12][13] of South Holland (Hollandic dialect)[14][15] spoken by the mainly Dutch settlers of what is now South Africa, where it gradually began to develop distinguishing characteristics in the course of the 18th century, including the loss of verbal conjugation (save for 5 modal verbs), as well as grammatical case and gender.
Since the colonial era, Indo-European languages such as Afrikaans, English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish have held official status in many countries, and are widely spoken, generally as lingua francas.
There are five Khoisan families that have not been shown to be related to each other: Khoe, Tuu and Kx'a, which are found mainly in Namibia and Botswana, as well as Sandawe and Hadza of Tanzania, which are language isolates.
Due partly to its multilingualism and its colonial past, a substantial proportion of the world's creole languages are to be found in Africa.
Many remain unclassified simply for lack of data; among the better-investigated ones that continue to resist easy classification are: Of these, Jalaa is perhaps the most likely to be an isolate.
Many of these are simply unclassified, but Hombert & Philippson believe Africa has about twenty language families, including isolates.
This presents a methodological complication when collecting data in Africa and limited literature exists.
[22][23] The colonial borders established by European powers following the Berlin Conference in 1884–1885 divided a great many ethnic groups and African language speaking communities.
Some notable cross-border languages include Berber (which stretches across much of North Africa and some parts of West Africa), Kikongo (that stretches across northern Angola, western and coastal Democratic Republic of the Congo, and western and coastal Republic of the Congo), Somali (stretches across most of the Horn of Africa), Swahili (spoken in the African Great Lakes region), Fula (in the Sahel and West Africa) and Luo (in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, South Sudan and Sudan).
Important South African languages are Sotho, Tswana, Pedi, Venda, Tsonga, Swazi, Southern Ndebele, Zulu, Xhosa and Afrikaans.
Tonal languages are also found in the Omotic, Chadic and South & East Cushitic branches of Afroasiatic.
The Niger–Congo languages have large numbers of genders (noun classes) which cause agreement in verbs and other words.
[39] Quite often, only one term is used for both animal and meat; the word nama or nyama for animal/meat is particularly widespread in otherwise widely divergent African languages.
