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After gaining independence, many African countries, in the search for national unity, selected one language, generally the former Indo-European colonial language, to be used in government and education. However, in recent years, African countries have become increasingly supportive of maintaining linguistic diversity.
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 Nilo-Saharan populations.
This is a list of countries by number of languages according to the 22nd edition of Ethnologue (2019). [1] ... South Africa: 30 12 42 0.59 51,004,892 1,416,803
Languages of Africa by country (56 C) Languages of the African diaspora (5 C, 48 P) * Language isolates of Africa (2 C, 11 P) Niger–Congo languages (14 C, 20 P)
Swahili is the most widespread lingua franca in East Africa. [21] In Congo, the local dialect of Swahili is known as Congo Swahili and differs considerably from Standard Swahili. [22] Many variations of Congo Swahili are spoken in the country but the major one is Kingwana, sometimes called Copperbelt Swahili, especially in the Katanga area.
Swahili has become a second language spoken by tens of millions of people in the five African Great Lakes countries (Kenya, DRC, Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania), where it is an official or national language. It is also the first language for many people in Tanzania, especially in the coastal regions of Tanga, Pwani, Dar es Salaam, Mtwara and Lindi.
There are over 520 native languages spoken in Nigeria. [1] [2] [3] The official language is English, [4] [5] which was the language of Colonial Nigeria.The English-based creole Nigerian Pidgin – first used by the British and African slavers to facilitate the Atlantic slave trade in the late 17th century [6] – is the most common lingua franca, spoken by over 60 million people.
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 ]