Page 70 - Languages Victoria December 2019

Languages Victoria
There are 40-50 languages in Africa that are spread across more than one national territory. Some are spread over two neighbouring countries, others are found in as many as twenty African countries. Swahili, for example, is widespread throughout East Africa, with about 100 million people using it as a Lingua Franca, although as a mother tongue it is spoken only by comparatively few people along the coast and on some islands, such as Zanzibar. In West Africa, there is a big language called Hausa, which we assume to be used by some 80 million people as a Lingua Franca across several countries. But there are also languages that have smaller numbers of people; people whose lifestyles, such as as cattle-farming nomads, makes them widespread across half of the continent, like the Fulbe and their language Fulfulde.
Most African languages, however, have less than 100,000 speakers. Half of them have less than 50,000; this observations mirrors the global situation. Only 4% of all living languages have more than 1 million speakers, in Africa as much as elsewhere. In this regard, European languages are highly exceptional because of their expansion during colonialism.
Some languages are related to each other by common origin, others are not. It‘s more complex in Africa than in Europe where, with only few exceptions, languages belong to just one language family, namely Indo- European. Until a few years ago, we assumed Africa had four major language families. This goes back to a very influential classification of African languages by the late US-linguist Joseph H. Greenberg from the 1950s and 60s. The largest language family is "Niger-Congo", named after the two river basins between and beyond which these languages are spoken, which includes about 1,500 languages, among them hundreds of Bantu languages that cover the southern half of the continent. It is the largest language family worldwide.
Then there is the "Afroasiatic" language family, which has produced about 350 languages, including the Berber languages in North Africa, many languages immediately south of the Sahara and most Ethiopian languages, and also the Semitic languages, including Arabic, which originate from the Near East.
The third group of some 200 languages is named "Nilo-Saharan", these languages are geographically sandwiched between the two other families, reaching from Lake Chad to the Great Lakes in East Africa. The fourth group, named “Khoisan”, of which there are only 20-30 languages left, can no longer be categorised as a single family; it has been split up into 5 groups. Currently, experts debate numbers between 6 and 20 for non- related language families and “isolates” in Africa.
Page 70 Volume 23 Number 2