What are the main language groups in Africa?
Language groups. Most languages spoken in Africa belong to one of four language families: Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo, and Khoisan.
Which is the African own language?
1. SWAHILI. The most spoken language in Africa is Swahili which is said to have between 100 and 150 million speakers. Known as a ‘Bantu’ language, Swahili apparently originated from other languages like Arabic.
What are the three general groups of African languages?
Most languages spoken in Africa belong to one of three large language families: Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan and Niger–Congo.
What are the 5 main languages in Africa?
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) all belong to the Niger-Congo family.
What is the most useful African language to learn?
Arguably, the most useful, indigenous African languages for Americans to learn are Yoruba (primarily spoken in Nigeria), Xhosa (South Africa), Swahili (Kenya, Tanzania, and much of East Africa), and Amharic (mainly Ethiopia).
What is the best African language to learn?
How are African languages classified?
In accordance with this classification the languages of the continent are exhaustively assigned to five families: Semitic, Hamitic, Bantu, Sudanese, and Bushman. The basis of classification is an analysis into linguistic types in which each linguistic family is distinguished by a set of structural characteris- tics.
What is the most beautiful African language?
Swahili is spoken primarily in Kenya and Tanzania, but speakers of this beautiful language can be found right across the continent of Africa.
What are the African language groups?
There are four major groups of African languages: Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharian, Niger-Saharian (Niger-Congo), and Khoisan, on the map you see the distribution of language families and some major African languages.
What are four major language families in Africa?
1) Indo-European – 2.910 Billion. The Indo-European language family is the largest in the world. 2) Sino-Tibetan Languages – 1.268 Billion. The Sino-Tibetan language family is the second largest in the world. 3) Niger-Congo Languages – 437 Million. 4) Austronesian Languages – 386 Million.
What are some of the languages Africans speak?
Hausa. Hausa is a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. 35 million people speak Hausa and many speak it as a second language.
What are some common African languages?
ARABIC. Arabic is the one of the most widely spoken languages in Africa at large.
