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Perhaps the most famous African writing system is ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. These developed later into forms known as Hieratic, Demotic and, through Phoenician and Greek, Coptic. The Coptic language is still used today as the liturgical language in the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria and the Coptic Catholic Church of Alexandria.
In this article, we explore the 12 oldest languages in Africa, highlighting their origins, unique features, and cultural significance. Join us on a journey through Africa’s linguistic history, where each language shows the continent’s enduring legacy. 1. Khoisan Languages.
However, Africa's oldest known writing system is over 6,000 years old. By contrast, continental Europe's oldest writing, Greek, was not fully in use until c. 1400 BC (a clay tablet found in Iklaina, Greece) and is largely derived from an older African script called Proto-Sinaitic.
Fifteen Ancient African Writing Systems. Now that it has been established that Europe’s oldest language system dates back to between 700 BCE and 750 BCE, if you consider the Etruscans, we now look at the African writing systems that predate it and Latin. There are nine of these and each one of them were very well developed.
It was an enormous discovery. This writing system, called Ajami, dispelled the false notion peddled by European colonialists that large swaths of communities in sub-Saharan Africa were illiterate, with no native written languages of their own.
"The Vai script of Liberia was created from scratch in about 1834 by eight completely illiterate men who wrote in ink made from crushed berries," says lead author Dr Piers Kelly, now at...
The collection of funerary texts are inscribed in Meroitic, one of Africa's earliest written languages. As Charles Q. Choi at LiveScience reports, the find is full of potential.
George Poulos. The vocal tract developed gradually over a long period, and the different stages in its development determined the types of sounds that could be produced. At the time of the “out...
Scholars classified Africa’s languages first to establish the internal historical relationships reflected in diverging speech communities, their histories of interaction reflected in lexical transfers, and the reconstructed vocabulary each ancient speech community used.
Experts have estimated that Proto-Afroasiatic emerged in Africa between 12,000 and 16,000 years ago. My research focused on the almost 200 Chadic languages spoken west, south and east of Lake...