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Major Horn of Africa languages are Somali, Amharic and Oromo. Lingala is important in Central Africa. Important South African languages are Sotho, Tswana, Pedi, Venda, Tsonga, Swazi, Southern Ndebele, Zulu, Xhosa and Afrikaans. [36] French, English, and Portuguese are important languages in Africa due to colonialism.
Most spoken languages, Ethnologue, 2024 [4] 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 ...
The following languages are listed as having at least 50 million first-language speakers in the 27th edition of Ethnologue published in 2024. [7] This section does not include entries that Ethnologue identifies as macrolanguages encompassing all their respective varieties , such as Arabic , Lahnda , Persian , Malay , Pashto , and Chinese .
This is a list of countries by number of languages according to the 22nd edition of Ethnologue (2019). [ 1 ] Papua New Guinea has the largest number of languages in the world.
There are over 520 native languages spoken in Nigeria. [1] [2] [3] The official language is English, [4] [5] which was the language of Colonial Nigeria.The English-based creole Nigerian Pidgin – first used by the British and African slavers to facilitate the Atlantic slave trade in the late 17th century [6] – is the most common lingua franca, spoken by over 60 million people.
The West Atlantic languages (also the Atlantic languages [note 1] or North Atlantic languages [1]) of West Africa are a major subgroup of the Niger–Congo languages.. The Atlantic languages are spoken along the Atlantic coast from Senegal to Liberia, though transhumant Fula speakers have spread eastward and are found in large numbers across the Sahel, from Senegal to Nigeria, Cameroon and Sudan.
The two official languages of Kenya, Swahili and English, are widely spoken as lingua francas; however, including second-language speakers, Swahili is more widely spoken than English. [1] Swahili is a Bantu language native to East Africa and English is inherited from British colonial rule.
Arabic, if counted as a single language, is by far the most widely spoken within the family, with around 300 million native speakers concentrated primarily in the Middle East and North Africa. [4] Other major Afroasiatic languages include the Cushitic Oromo language with 45 million native speakers, the Chadic Hausa language with over 34 million ...