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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. [ 36 ] French, English, and Portuguese are important languages in Africa due to colonialism.
Khoi-San (unity doubtful; Khoikhoi, San, Sandawe + Hadza) Malayo-Polynesian (Malagasy) Indo-European (Afrikaaner) The ethnic groups of Africa number in the thousands, with each ethnicity generally having their own language (or dialect of a language) and culture. The ethnolinguistic groups include various Afroasiatic, Khoisan, Niger-Congo, and ...
The Languages of Africa is a 1963 book of essays by the linguist Joseph Greenberg, in which the author sets forth a genetic classification of African languages that, with some changes, continues to be the most commonly used one today. It is an expanded and extensively revised version of his 1955 work Studies in African Linguistic Classification ...
English and Pidgin. English is the single most widely spoken language in Nigeria, spoken by 60 million of the population. [9] It is the main lingua franca of the country and there are a growing number of sole English speakers due to rapid urbanization and globalization. [10] English remains the official language and is the major language of ...
Languages of Tanzania. Tanzania is a multilingual country. There are many languages spoken in the country, none of which is spoken natively by a majority or a large plurality of the population. Swahili and English, the latter of which was inherited from colonial rule (see Tanganyika Territory), are widely spoken as lingua francas.
Most native speakers of Swahili live in Tanzania, where it is a national language, while as a second language, it is taught as a mandatory subject in many schools in East Africa, and is a lingua franca of the East African Community. Other major Bantu languages include Lingala with more than 20 million speakers (Congo, DRC), followed by Zulu ...
Ghana is a multilingual country in which about eighty languages are spoken. [ 7 ] Of these, English, which was inherited from the colonial era, is the official language and lingua franca. [ 8 ][ 9 ] Of the languages indigenous to Ghana, Akan is the most widely spoken in the south. [ 10 ] Dagbani, Dagare, Sisaala, Waale, and Gonja are among the ...
The name refers to the fact that it is the only major language family with large populations in both Africa and Asia. [14] Due to concerns that "Afroasiatic" could imply the inclusion of all languages spoken across Africa and Asia, the name "Afrasian" (Russian: afrazijskije) was proposed by Igor Diakonoff in 1980. At present it predominantly ...