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Although many African languages are used on the radio, in newspapers and in primary-school education, and some of the larger ones are considered national languages, only a few are official at the national level. In Sub-Saharan Africa, most official languages at the national level tend to be colonial languages such as French, Portuguese, or English.
Number of living languages Number of speakers Established Immigrant Total Percent [note 1] Total Mean Median 1 Papua New Guinea: 840 0 840 11.81 4,213,381 5,040 1,315 2 Indonesia: 707 2 709 9.98 222,191,197 315,165 3,500 3 Nigeria: 525 7 524 7.37 163,317,444 348,225 14,000 4 India: 453 6 459 1,257,421,714 2,924,237 35,000 5 China (mainland only)
The most common language spoken as a first language by South Africans is Zulu (23 percent), followed by Xhosa (16 percent), and Afrikaans (14 percent). English is the fourth most common first language in the country (9.6%), but is understood in most urban areas and is the dominant language in government and the media. [4]
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, Chinese and Arabic are sometimes considered single languages, but each includes several mutually unintelligible varieties , and so they are sometimes considered language families instead.
The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of around 210 African languages [1] spoken by somewhere around 70 million speakers, [1] mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet. The languages extend through 17 nations in the northern half of Africa ...
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.
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 most widely spoken languages of Africa, Swahili (100 million), Hausa (38 million), Yoruba (20 million), Amharic (20 million), Igbo (21 million), and Fula (13 million), belong mostly to the Niger-Congo family. [61] Very few countries of Africa use any single language, and for this reason, several official languages coexist, African and European.