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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, [1] and by some counts at over 3,000. [2]
Although the first known text by native speakers dates to 1885, the first record of the language is a list of words recorded in 1793 by Alexander MacKenzie. 1885: Motu: grammar by W.G. Lawes: 1886: Guugu Yimidhirr: notes by Johann Flierl, Wilhelm Poland and Georg Schwarz, culminating in Walter Roth's The Structure of the Koko Yimidir Language ...
The earliest written language associated with the Nilo-Saharan family is Old Nubian, one of the oldest written African languages, attested in writing from the 8th to the 15th century AD. This larger classification system is not accepted by all linguists, however.
Old Nubian is one of the oldest written African languages and appears to have been adopted from the 10th–11th century as the main language for the civil and religious administration of Makuria. Besides Old Nubian, Koine Greek was widely used, especially in religious contexts, while Coptic mainly predominates in funerary inscriptions. [2]
Though the Latin Script was used to write Latin throughout Roman Africa and a handful of Latin-script inscriptions in the Punic language (more commonly written in the Phoenician script, as noted above) also survive, [44] [45] the first systematic attempts to adapt it to African languages were probably those of Christian missionaries on the eve ...
The use of full or partial reduplication may derive from contact with other African languages rather than from Proto-Afroasiatic. [144] Carsten Peust, on the other hand, argues that the presence of such verbs in Egyptian, the oldest attested language, and in Chadic and Semitic makes them a good candidate for reconstruction in Proto-Afroasiatic ...
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
This is a list of extinct languages of Africa, languages which have undergone language death, have no native speakers and no spoken descendant. There are 69 languages listed. There are 69 languages listed.