Page 166 - Volume 2_CHANGES_merged_with links

Obstacles to progress

Challenges

Niger-Saharian (Niger-Congo)
covering the two third of Africa with as a principal branch the Niger-Congo which gathers more
than 1000 languages with some 200 millions speakers. The Bantu languages of Central,

Southern, and Eastern Africa form a sub-group of the Niger Congo branch.
Khoisan
gathering about thirty languages in Western part of Southern Africa.
All African languages are considered official languages of the African Union “

"Spoken Languages of African Countries" 182
Nations Online Project

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Colonial Languages
“ During the period of colonisation European languages, or colonial languages, became the
official language(s) in most Africa countries.

While this remains the case even today, most Africans speak indigenous African languages as
a first language and colonial languages are generally spoken as a second or third language.
Often schools are instructed in European languages, and official government business is

conducted using European languages.
According to the Ethnologue, 13 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (excluding the southern

portion of the continent, where Niger-Congo languages coexist side by side with Khoisan
languages) are listed with 50 or more living languages. This list includes such countries as

Chad (131 languages), Tanzania (128 languages), Ghana (79 languages), Côte d'Ivoire (78
languages), Central African Republic (71 languages), Kenya (69 languages), Burkina Faso (68

languages), Congo (62 languages), Mali (57 languages) and Benin (54 languages).
Number three on this list is Democratic Republic of Congo with nearly twice as many
languages as Chad (215 languages). Number two is Cameroon with 278 languages. And the

top of the list is Nigeria with 514 living languages! “
"Linguistic Diversity in Africa and Europe " 183
Languages Of The World."
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“ While they boast fewer languages (14 and 10 respectively), there is another measure which
shows how highly multilingual such countries are. This measure is the average number of
speakers per language (i.e., the total population of a state divided by the number of living

languages listed).
When this figure is calculated, many smaller African countries emerge as highly multilingual,

alongside such multilingual countries as
Cameroon (278 languages)

Congo (62 languages)