African Languages

I

Introduction

African Languages, group of languages that are native to Africa. Scholars estimate that the number of distinctive languages spoken on the African continent totals at least 2,000—more languages than are spoken on any other continent. Some experts place that number even higher. Of these languages, about 50 have 500,000 or more speakers. The majority of African languages are spoken by relatively few people. Hadza, spoken in Tanzania, ranks among the languages with the fewest speakers—about 200 people.

Swahili and Hausa are the two most widely spoken African languages. Swahili is spoken by as many as 50 million people, most of whom live in East and Central Africa. About 25 million people speak Hausa, primarily in the West African country of Nigeria. Other African languages with large numbers of speakers include Fulfulde in Senegal, Cameroon, and Chad; Yoruba, spoken in Nigeria and Benin; and Igbo of Nigeria.

Not all languages spoken in Africa are native to the continent. Arabic, which many people in northern Africa speak as their first language, was brought to Africa by immigrants from Arabia between the 7th and the 11th centuries. Malagasy, the language of Madagascar, belongs to the Austronesian group of languages with origins in Indonesia. European colonists brought English, French, and Portuguese to Africa, starting in the 1500s.

II

Classifying African Languages

American linguist Joseph H. Greenberg provided the first comprehensive classification of African languages. In The Languages of Africa (1963) he traced the historical origin and development of African languages, and classified them into four major groups: Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan. Today, the largest language group in number of speakers, Niger-Congo, has from 300 million to 400 million speakers. The second largest group, Afro-Asiatic, has from 200 million to 300 million, followed by Nilo-Saharan with nearly 30 million and Khoisan with about 200,000 to 300,000. These figures represent rough estimates, however; accurate figures are unavailable, and many Africans speak more than one language.

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In classifying African languages, Greenberg compared lists of basic words from a large number of languages. He also compared similarities in the forms and functions of grammatical structures. Languages belonging to the same group share certain basic vocabulary—words known as cognates—and grammatical features that trace back to a common origin. Linguists refer to this shared origin as the protolanguage or the ancestral language.

Dialects form when groups of people who speak the same language move apart, and their languages change in different ways. At first, each group can understand the variants spoken by the other groups, but after hundreds of years of separation the variants may become mutually unintelligible. By that time, distinct languages have formed with cognates and similar grammatical systems. Swahili, for example, belongs to the Bantu language group. All Bantu languages trace their roots to Cameroon and western Nigeria, where linguists believe the ancestral language originated.

Linguists describe most African languages as tonal, because the pitch at which a syllable or group of syllables is pronounced can indicate meaning. Some African languages have a noun class system in which speakers attach prefixes and suffixes to noun stems to indicate singular or plural or to express qualities of the noun, such as size or animacy (whether the entity referred to is animate or inanimate). Other African languages distinguish between masculine and feminine nouns, or between masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns.

III

Niger-Congo Family

The largest family of African languages, the Niger-Congo family, comprises over 1,400 languages, which altogether have an estimated 300 million to 400 million speakers. Linguists disagree about the grouping of these languages, but three branches of the family are generally recognized: Atlantic-Congo, Mande, and Kordofanian. The Atlantic-Congo linguistic area covers almost all of Africa south of the Sahara. The Kordofanian languages, by contrast, are found in a small area of the Nuba hills in southern Sudan. Languages of the Mande branch are spoken in West Africa.

Although migrations presumably separated certain groups of the Atlantic-Congo branch more than 5,000 years ago, the many languages in this family have similar words for many common objects and actions. The more distantly related Kordofanian languages have a few such similar words and show some striking resemblances to the Atlantic-Congo languages in grammatical structure. The Atlantic-Congo branch is further divided into subfamilies, although this classification is controversial. Major subfamilies include Benue-Congo, Atlantic, and Volta-Congo.

The Benue-Congo languages of southern and central Africa form a large subgroup of the Atlantic-Congo branch. A relationship among most of the Benue-Congo languages has been recognized for more than a century. These related languages have become widely known as Bantu (a word meaning “the people” in many languages of the group). Some of the more important Bantu languages are Zulu and Xhosa in South Africa; Makua in Mozambique; Nyanja in Malawi; Shona in Zimbabwe; Bemba in Zambia; Kimbundu and Umbundu in Angola; Swahili and Sukuma in Tanzania; Kikuyu in Kenya; Ganda in Uganda; Rwanda in Rwanda; Rundi in Burundi; Ngala and Kongo in the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and Fang and Bulu in Cameroon. Bantu-speaking authors have developed a vibrant literary tradition in their indigenous languages since the mid-1900s.

The Bantu languages are part of the Benue-Congo subgroup and can be grouped with certain languages of Nigeria, such as Tiv and Birom. Other important Benue-Congo languages are Yoruba and Igbo, both with a large number of speakers in Nigeria.

Languages in the Atlantic subgroup of the Atlantic-Congo branch are spoken near Africa’s Atlantic coast, from Senegal to Chad. The dominant language of this group, Fulfulde, has more than 13 million speakers in Senegal, Cameroon, and Chad. Other languages in this subgroup include Wolof in Senegal and Temne in Guinea.

North of the Bantu language area, in the north of the Republic of the Congo and adjacent territory, is the north branch of the Volta-Congo subfamily. The most widely spoken languages in this subfamily are Zande and Ngbandi. A Ngbandi-based creole known as Sango is widely used as a lingua franca—that is, a language for trade and communication—in the Central African Republic and is growing in importance. Extending from western Nigeria into much of Côte d’Ivoire and Mali are the languages of the Gur subfamily, including Mòoré in Burkina Faso.

Languages in the Mande subgroup are spoken in Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Bambara, spoken in Mali, is the principal language in this subgroup. Other Mande languages include Mende, spoken in Sierra Leone, and Kpelle, spoken in Liberia and Guinea.

Most languages in the Niger-Congo family, with the exception of Swahili and Fulfulde, are tonal. In tonal languages, the meaning of the same set of letters may vary with the pitch at which the speaker pronounces them. In Yoruba, for example, the word bi means “to deliver a baby” if pronounced with a middle tone, but if pronounced with a low tone it means “to throw up,” and if pronounced with a high tone, “to ask.” In Bambara, the word ba means “river” when pronounced with a high tone, and “goat” when pronounced with a low tone.

Bantu languages and other languages in the Benue-Congo subgroup form verbs by adding prefixes and suffixes to a verb stem. Prefixes, which come before the verb stem, indicate who (the subject), when (the time period), and what (the object); suffixes, which come after the verb stem, express prepositional phrases, causal relationships, and passive voice. The English sentence “He is cooking for me,” for example, can be expressed by a single word, ananipikia, in Swahili. In Shona, another Bantu language, ari kundibikira expresses “he is cooking for me.” The verb stem pik in Swahili and bik in Shona are cognates that can be traced back to a proto-Bantu language. Other words that can be traced back to a Niger-Congo protolanguage include “yesterday,” which is jana in Swahili and ana in Yoruba, and “three,” which is tatu in Swahili, eeta in Yoruba, and ati in Fulfulde.

Another important feature of languages in the Benue-Congo subgroup is a noun class system in which prefixes and suffixes are attached to the noun stem. In Bantu languages, nouns normally consist of a prefix followed by a noun stem. The prefix can indicate number, the equivalent in English of one person and people. In Swahili m before a noun indicates one, and wa indicates more than one; thus, mtu means “one person” and watu, “people.” In Zulu the singular/plural alternation is umu/aba, and umuntu and abantu designate “one person” and “people.” In Shona this alternation is mu/va, and munhu/vanhu express whether one person or more than one is meant. The Swahili watu, Zulu abantu, and Shona vanhu are similar words that go back to proto-Bantu.

In Bantu languages nouns and other parts of speech—such as demonstratives (“this” and “those,” for example), verbs, and adjectives—undergo changes for agreement, as the following example demonstrates. The English sentence “This good chair is broken” is expressed in Swahili as kiti hiki kizuri kimevunjika; the plural form, “These good chairs are broken,” becomes viti hivi vizuri vimevunjika. The prefixes ki- and vi- of kiti/viki (chair/chairs) agree with the demonstrative hiki/hivi (this/these), the adjectives kizuri/vizuri (good), and the verbs kimevunjika/vimevunjika (broken). This type of agreement occurs in all Bantu languages.

IV

Afro-Asiatic Family

Afro-Asiatic languages have an estimated 200 million to 300 million speakers in northern Africa, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the area around Lake Chad in central Africa. The basic vocabulary shared by the Afro-Asiatic languages reflects a pastoral life spent raising and herding livestock and growing food crops. The Afro-Asiatic family is divided into six subgroups with a total of more than 350 languages. These subgroups are Chadic, Berber, Semitic, Cushitic, Egyptian, and Omotic. The protolanguage of this family, which began to diverge into separate branches about 6,000 years ago, is known as ancestral Semitic. It is also the protolanguage of other Semitic languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew.

Chadic, which consists of about 100 languages with more than 30 million speakers, is the largest subgroup in the Afro-Asiatic family. Hausa, its principal language, is also the most important language in the Afro-Asiatic family. About 22 million people speak Hausa as a first language or fluent second language, and most of them live in northern Nigeria and southern Niger. Hausa also serves as the lingua franca in West Africa, especially Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, and in parts of Libya. Hausa has borrowed many words from neighboring languages, such as Yoruba and Tuareg. It has also borrowed extensively from Arabic.

Berber languages have approximately 11 million speakers in northern Africa. The dominant language of this group, Tamarshak (also spelled Tamasheq), is spoken by the Tuareg people. Semitic languages include Amharic and Tigrinya, which linguists trace back to Ge’ez, a language spoken in northern Ethiopia from 1,000 to 2,000 years ago. Beja and Oromo rank as the principal languages of the Cushitic subgroup, with Beja spoken in Sudan and Eritrea, and Oromo in Ethiopia. The Egyptian subgroup dates back at least 5,000 years, but the Egyptian language has not been spoken for about 600 years. Its final phase, known as Coptic, remains alive as the liturgical language of the Coptic Church. The Omotic languages, once classified in the Cushitic branch, are spoken on the Omo plateau in Ethiopia.

Languages in the Afro-Asiatic family share many features. One shared feature is the emphatic consonant, such that the amount of stress the speaker places on a consonant changes the meaning of certain words. For example, the Hausa word mana means “for us,” whereas with an emphatic pronunciation of the consonant n in manna, it means “press against.” Similarly, hama means “hammer” but pronounced with an emphatic m in hamma, it means “yawning.” The languages in this family also distinguish between masculine and feminine nouns. Feminine nouns typically have a final t. For example, in Amharic the word for man is sew and for woman is set; likewise, ligu means boy, and ligitu, girl.