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For greater detail, see Distribution of languages in the world. This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect. For example, Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic, other authors consider its mutually ...
The main ethnolinguistic divisions in Africa are Afro-Asiatic (approximately 200 languages) covering nearly Northern Africa (including the horn of Africa, Central Sahara et the top Nile), [62] Niger–Congo with approximately 1,350 - 1,650 languages is the largest of the four; it is also the largest language family in the world.
Papua New Guinea has the largest number of languages in the world. [2] [3] Number of living languages and speakers ... South Africa: 30 12 42 0.59 51,004,892
The colonial borders established by European powers following the Berlin Conference in 1884–1885 divided a great many ethnic groups and African language speaking communities. This can cause divergence of a language on either side of a border (especially when the official languages are different), for example, in orthographic standards.
This is a list of languages by number of native speakers. Current distribution of human language families. All such rankings of human languages ranked by their number of native speakers should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum. [1]
However, between 1925 and 1984 Dutch and Afrikaans were seen as two varieties of the same language by the Official Languages of the Union Act, 1925 and later article 119 of the South African Constitution of 1961. After a short period (1984-1994) where Afrikaans and English were the two co-official languages of South Africa, Afrikaans has been ...
South Africa: Africa 59,622,350 [3] More than 436,000 Hindi speakers. [4] According to the Constitution of South Africa, the Pan South African Language Board must promote and ensure respect for Hindi along with other languages. Fiji: Oceania 889,327 [5] Fiji Hindi is official alongside English and Fijian. Total 1,649,107,118
Africa is the world's second-largest ... to fluently speak not only multiple African languages, ... 400,000 people. [251] Many of the Khoisan languages are ...