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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.
Contents. Languages of Nigeria. There are over 525 native languages spoken in Nigeria. [ 1 ][ 2 ][ 3 ] The official language and most widely spoken lingua franca is English, [ 4 ][ 5 ] which was the language of Colonial Nigeria. Nigerian Pidgin – an English-based creole – is spoken by over 60 million people. [ 5 ][ 6 ]
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 Nilo-Saharan populations.
Swahili, also known by its local name Kiswahili, is a Bantu language originally spoken by the Swahili people, who are found primarily in Tanzania, Kenya, and Mozambique (along the East African coast and adjacent littoral islands). [6] Estimates of the number of Swahili speakers, including both native and second-language speakers, vary widely.
Non-Bantu languages are greyscale. The Bantu languages (English: UK: / ˌbænˈtuː /, US: / ˈbæntuː / Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) [1][2] are a language family of about 600 languages that are spoken by the Bantu peoples of Central, Southern, Eastern and Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages.
1000–3000 /km². >3000 /km². Tswana, also known by its native name Setswana, and previously spelled Sechuana in English, is a Bantu language spoken in and indigenous to Southern Africa by about 8.2 million people. [1] It is closely related to the Northern Sotho and Southern Sotho languages, as well as the Kgalagadi language and the Lozi ...
Polyglotta Africana is a study published in 1854 by the German missionary Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle (1823–1902), in which the author compares 280 words from 200 African languages and dialects (or about 120 separate languages according to today's classification; several varieties considered distinct by Koelle were later shown to belong to the same language).
Egyptian hieroglyphs. The writing systems of Africa refer to the current and historical practice of writing systems on the African continent, both indigenous and those introduced. In many African societies, history generally used to be recorded orally despite most societies having developed a writing script, leading to them being termed "oral ...