What are the 5 major language families in Africa?
African Languages are categorized into five major language families including Afroasiatic, Austronesian, Indo-European, Niger–Congo (Bantu and non-Bantu) and Nilo-Saharan languages.
What language families are found in Africa?
Most languages spoken in Africa belong to one of three large language families: Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan and Niger–Congo.
What are the three major language families in Africa?
It is home to the three major language families on the African continent: Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan.
How many languages groups are there in Africa?
Africa is a continent with a very high linguistic diversity, there are an estimated 1500-2000 African languages. gathering appoximately 140 languages with some eleven millions speakers scattered in Central and Eastern Africa.
What is the most prevalent language in Africa?
While Arabic is the most spoken language in Africa, there’s plenty more – other popular languages include Amharic, Berber, Portuguese, Oromo, Igbo, Yoruba, Zulu and Shona.
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 language does the African speak?
The most widely spoken languages of Africa, Swahili (100 million), Yoruba (20 million), Igbo (21 million), and Fula (13 million) all belong to the Niger-Congo family. Learn more about the Niger-Congo language family on Ethnologue.
How many language groups are in Nigeria?
three
The languages of Nigeria are classified into three broad linguistic groups: Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Afro-Asiatic.
What are the 3 biggest language families?
Language Families With The Highest Number Of Speakers
Rank | Language Family | Estimated Speakers |
---|---|---|
1 | Indo-European | 2,910,000,000 |
2 | Sino-Tibetan | 1,268,000,000 |
3 | Niger-Congo | 437,000,000 |
4 | Austronesian | 386,000,000 |