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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] Nigeria alone has over 500 languages (according to SIL Ethnologue), [3] one of the greatest concentrations of linguistic diversity in the world.
For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world. This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect. For example, Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic, other authors consider its mutually ...
This is a list of countries by number of languages according to the 22nd edition of Ethnologue (2019). [ 1 ] Papua New Guinea has the largest number of languages in the world.
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 ...
[54] [53] Arabic, spoken in both Asia and Africa, is by far the most widely spoken Afroasiatic language today, [4] with around 300 million native speakers, while the Ethiopian Amharic language has around 25 million; collectively, Semitic is the largest branch of Afroasiatic by number of current speakers. [7]
It is one of the Manding languages and is most closely related to Bambara, being mutually intelligible with Bambara as well as Malinke. It is a trade language in West Africa and is spoken by millions of people, either as a first or second language. Similar to the other Mande languages, it uses tones.
official language(s) Current spoken language(s) Historically belonged to Historical official language(s) Historical spoken language(s) Time period Continent 1 Afghanistan: Pashto, Dari: Pashto, Dari, various others: Umayyad Caliphate: Arabic: Pashto, Dari, Uzbek, Turkmen, Central Asian Arabic: 661–750: Asia 2 Armenia: Armenian: Armenian ...
Today, Afrikaans is recognised as one of the eleven official languages of South Africa, and is the third most common first language in South Africa. In June 2013, the Department of Basic Education included Afrikaans as an African language to be compulsory for all pupils.