Afroasiatic languages

Afroasiatic languages are spoken throughout North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Western Asia and parts of the Sahel. There are approximately 375 Afroasiatic languages spoken by over 400 million people. The main subfamilies of Afroasiatic are Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Omotic, Egyptian and Semitic. The Afroasiatic Urheimat is uncertain. The family's most extensive branch, the Semitic languages (including Arabic, Amharic and Hebrew among others), is the only branch of Afroasiatic that is spoken outside Africa.^[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). Of the world's surviving language families, Afroasiatic has the longest written history, as both the Akkadian language of Mesopotamia and Ancient Egyptian are members.

Nilo-Saharan languages

Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed grouping of some one hundred diverse languages. 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.

This hypothetical family would reach an expanse that stretches from the Nile Valley to northern Tanzania and into Nigeria and DR Congo, with the Songhay languages along the middle reaches of the Niger River as a geographic outlier. The inclusion of the Songhay languages is questionable, and doubts have been raised over the Koman, Gumuz and Kadu branches.

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. Most Nilo-Saharan languages are tonal, as are Niger-Congo languages.^{[citation needed]}

Niger–Congo languages

The Niger–Congo languages constitute the largest language family spoken in West Africa and perhaps the world in terms of the number of languages. One of its salient features is an elaborate noun class system with grammatical concord. A large majority of languages of this family are tonal such as Yoruba and Igbo, Akan and Ewe language. A major branch of Niger–Congo languages is the Bantu phylum, which has a wider speech area than the rest of the family (see Niger–Congo B (Bantu) in the map above).

The Niger–Kordofanian language family, joining Niger–Congo with the Kordofanian languages of south-central Sudan, was proposed in the 1950s by Joseph Greenberg. Today, linguists often 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. Mande has been claimed to be equally or more divergent. Niger–Congo is generally accepted by linguists, though a few question the inclusion of Mande and Dogon, and there is no conclusive evidence for the inclusion of Ubangian.

Other language families

Several languages spoken in Africa belong to language families concentrated or originating outside the African continent.

Official languages

Afroasiatic

• Berber:
  • Berber in Morocco and Algeria^[22]
  • Tamasheq in Mali^[23]
  • Tawellemet in Mali^[23]
• Cushitic:
  • Afar in Ethiopia
  • Oromo in Ethiopia and Kenya
  • Somali in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti
• Semitic:
  • Amharic in Ethiopia
  • Arabic in Algeria, Chad, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania,^[24] Morocco, Somalia,^[25] Sudan, Tunisia and Zanzibar (Tanzania)
  • Hassaniya Arabic in Mali^[23]
  • Tigrinya in Ethiopia and Eritrea

Austronesian

• Malagasy in Madagascar

Ngbandi creole

• Sango in the Central African Republic

French Creole

• Seychelles Creole in Seychelles

Indo-European

• Afrikaans in South Africa
• English in Ghana, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Liberia, Zambia, Malawi, Rwanda, Namibia, Seychelles, Sudan, Tanzania, Eswatini, Lesotho, and Mauritius.
• French in Benin, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Djibouti, Gabon, Guinea, Madagascar, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, and Togo.^[26]
• Portuguese in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe and Equatorial Guinea.^[27]
• Spanish in Equatorial Guinea^[28]

Niger-Congo

• Bambara in Mali^[23]
• Bobo in Mali^[23]
• Bozo in Mali^[23]
• Chewa in Malawi and Zimbabwe
• Comorian in the Comoros
• Dogon in Mali^[23]
• Fula in Mali^[23]
• Kassonke in Mali^[23]
• Kongo in Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, and Republic of the Congo
• Kinyarwanda in Rwanda
• Kirundi in Burundi
• Maninke in Mali^[23]
• Minyanka in Mali^[23]
• Senufo in Mali^[23]
• Sesotho in Lesotho, South Africa and Zimbabwe
• Setswana in Botswana and South Africa
• Shona, Sindebele in Zimbabwe
• Sepedi in South Africa
• Soninke in Mali^[23]
• Ndebele in South Africa^[29]
• Swahili in Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda
• Swati in Eswatini (Swaziland) and South Africa
• Tsonga in South Africa
• Venda in South Africa
• Xhosa in South Africa
• Zulu in South Africa

Nilo-Saharan

• Songhay in Mali^[23]

Cross-border languages

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. This can cause divergence of a language on either side of a border (especially when the official languages are different), for example, in orthographic standards. 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).

Some prominent Africans such as former Malian president and former Chairman of the African Commission, Alpha Oumar Konaré, have referred to cross-border languages as a factor that can promote African unity.^[33]

Language change and planning

Language is not static in Africa any more than on other continents.^{[citation needed]} In addition to the (likely modest) impact of borders, there are also cases of dialect levelling (such as in Igbo and probably many others), koinés (such as N'Ko and possibly Runyakitara) and emergence of new dialects (such as Sheng). In some countries, there are official efforts to develop standardized language versions.

There are also many less widely spoken languages that may be considered endangered languages.

Demographics

Of the 1 billion Africans (in 2009), about 17 percent speak an Arabic dialect.^{[citation needed]} About 10 percent speak Swahili,^{[citation needed]} the lingua franca of Southeast Africa; about 5 percent speak a Berber dialect;^{[citation needed]} and about 5 percent speak Hausa, which serves as a lingua franca in much of the Sahel. Other large West African languages are Yoruba, Igbo, Akan and Fula. Major Horn of Africa languages are Somali, Amharic and Oromo. Lingala is important in Central Africa. Important South African languages are Sotho, Tswana, Pedi, Venda, Tsonga, Swazi, Southern Ndebele, Zulu, Xhosa and Afrikaans.^[34]

French, English and Portuguese are important languages in Africa. About 320 million,^[35][36] 240 million and 35 million Africans, respectively, speak them as either native or secondary languages. Portuguese has become the national language of Angola and São Tomé and Príncipe, and Portuguese is the official language of Mozambique. The economies of Angola and Mozambique are quickly becoming economic powerhouses in Africa.^[37]

Phonological

Some widespread phonetic features include:

• certain types of consonants, such as implosives (/ɓa/), ejectives (/kʼa/), the labiodental flap and in southern Africa, clicks (/ǂa/, /ᵑǃa/). True implosives are rare outside Africa, and clicks and the flap almost unheard of.
• doubly articulated labial-velar stops like /k͡pa/ and /ɡ͡ba/ are found in places south of the Sahara.
• prenasalized consonants, like /mpa/ and /ŋɡa/, are widespread in Africa but not common outside it.
• sequences of stops and fricatives at the beginnings of words, such as /fsa/, /pta/ and /dt͡sk͡xʼa/.
• nasal stops which only occur with nasal vowels, such as [ba] vs. [mã] (but both [pa] and [pã]), especially in West Africa.
• vowels contrasting an advanced or retracted tongue, commonly called "tense" and "lax".
• simple tone systems which are used for grammatical purposes.

Sounds that are relatively uncommon in African languages include uvular consonants, diphthongs and front rounded vowels

Tonal languages are found throughout the world but are especially common in Africa - in fact, there are far more tonal than non-tonal languages in Africa. Both the Nilo-Saharan and the Khoi-San phyla are fully tonal. The large majority of the Niger–Congo languages are also tonal. Tonal languages are also found in the Omotic, Chadic and South & East Cushitic branches of Afroasiatic. The most common type of tonal system opposes two tone levels, High (H) and Low (L). Contour tones do occur, and can often be analysed as two or more tones in succession on a single syllable. Tone melodies play an important role, meaning that it is often possible to state significant generalizations by separating tone sequences ("melodies") from the segments that bear them. Tonal sandhi processes like tone spread, tone shift, downstep and downdrift are common in African languages.

Syntactic

Widespread syntactical structures include the common use of adjectival verbs and the expression of comparison by means of a verb 'to surpass'. The Niger–Congo languages have large numbers of genders (noun classes) which cause agreement in verbs and other words. Case, tense and other categories may be distinguished only by tone. Auxiliary verbs are also widespread among African languages; the fusing of subject markers and TAM/polarity auxiliaries into what are known as tense pronouns are more common in auxiliary verb constructions in African languages than in most other parts of the world.^[38]

Semantic

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.^{[citation needed]}

By region

Below is a list of the major languages of Africa by region, family and total number of primary language speakers in millions.

General

• Writing systems of Africa
• Journal of West African Languages
• List of extinct languages of Africa

Works

• Polyglotta Africana
• The Languages of Africa

Classifiers

• Karl Lepsius
• Lionel Bender
• Wilhelm Bleek
• Christopher Ehret
• Carl Meinhof
• Diedrich Westermann
• Joseph Greenberg

Colonial and migratory influences

• Arabization
• Asian Africans
• Dutch Language Union
• French West Africa
• German colonization of Africa
• Islamization of Egypt
• Italian East Africa — including Italian Ethiopia
• Italian North Africa
• North African Arabs
• Maghrebi Arabic — via Muslim conquest of the Maghreb
• Portuguese language in Africa — predominant in Portuguese-speaking African countries
• Spanish Guinea — presently Equatorial Guinea
• Spanish West Africa
• Spanish North Africa
• West African Pidgin English
• White Africans of European ancestry