Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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.
Language Family Branch First-language (L1) speakers Second-language (L2) speakers Total speakers (L1+L2) English (excl. creole languages) Indo-European: Germanic: 380 million 1.135 billion 1.515 billion Mandarin Chinese (incl. Standard Chinese, but excl. other varieties) Sino-Tibetan: Sinitic: 941 million 199 million 1.140 billion Hindi (excl ...
Afrikaans, a language primarily descended from Dutch, is the mother tongue of Afrikaners and most Cape Coloureds. [9] According to the South African National Census of 2022, 10.6% of South Africans claimed to speak Afrikaans as a first language at home, making it the third most widely spoken home language in the country. [10]
Between 1910 and 1961 Dutch was a co-official language of South Africa, together with English. In 1961 Dutch was replaced by Afrikaans as a co-official language. 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 ...
The San are the pre-Bantu indigenous people of southern Africa, while Pygmies are the pre-Bantu indigenous African peoples of Central Africa. [51] The peoples of West Africa primarily speak Niger–Congo languages belonging mostly, though not exclusively, to its non-Bantu branches, though some Nilo-Saharan and Afroasiatic-speaking groups are ...
Africa is the most multilingual continent in the world, and it is not rare for individuals to fluently speak not only multiple African languages, but one or more European ones as well. [further explanation needed] There are four major groups indigenous to Africa: A simplistic view of language families spoken in Africa
Hausa is the largest Chadic language by native speakers, and is spoken by a large number of people as a lingua franca in Northern Nigeria. [38] It may have as many as 80 to 100 million first and second language speakers. [35]
The most common language spoken as a first language by South Africans is Zulu (23%), followed by Xhosa (16%), and Afrikaans (14%). English is the fourth most common first language in the country (9.6%), but is understood in most urban areas and is the dominant language in government and the media.