African Languages
The recent statistical report says that, in the continent of Africa there are more than 200 languages spoken by the people.To be specific the number of languages, spoken in African continent lies between 2000 and 3000 languages.
Apart from this there are over 8000 dialects, that fits into these 300 languages.The major four classification of language families that are spoken in Africa can be divided into six types namely
1)Afro - Asiatic
2)Nilo - Saharan
3)Niger - Congo A
4)Niger - Congo B
5)Khoi - San
6)Austronesian
The image below shows exactly where these kind of languages are spoken
To be specific most these African Languages are group of languages that are native to the African continent(with some esception) and the the scholars estimate that out of these 3000 different kinds of languages 50 languages may have 500,000 or more speakers.
But the fact is that the majority of African languages are spoken only by relatively few people. For example languages like Hadza,which is spoken in Tanzania, unfortunately ranks among the languages with the fewest speakers, because reports says that only about 200 people speak this language and the people who speak this Hazda language are called as the Hazda people and the image belows shows the Hazda people
On the contrary the most widely spoken languages includes Swahili and Hausa and it is estimated that more than 50 million people speak Swahili, and this language is spoken by the people who live in East and Central Africa.
In the case of Hausa language, report says that about 25 million people speak this language, and primarily they are located in the West African country of Nigeria. Apart form these two languages other other African languages with large numbers of speakers includes
1)Fulfulde in Senegal, Cameroon, and Chad
2)Yoruba in Nigeria and Benin
3)Igbo in Nigeria.
But apart from all these reports the truth is that not all languages spoken in Africa are native to the continent. The Northern Africa speak Arabic as their first language, and it was brought to Africa by immigrants from Arabia between the 7th and the 11th centuries.
In the case of Madagascar Malagasy is the language spoken by most of the people, and belongs to the Austronesian group of languages with origins in Indonesia. Apart from this, starting from the 15th century the European colonists brought English, French, and Portuguese to Africa.
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