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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.
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, Chinese and Arabic are sometimes considered single languages, but each includes several mutually unintelligible varieties , and so they are sometimes considered language families instead.
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.
Number of living languages Number of speakers Established Immigrant Total Percent [note 1] Total Mean Median Papua New Guinea: 840 0 840 11.81 4,213,381 5,040 1,315 Indonesia: 707 2 709 9.98 222,191,197 315,165 3,500 Nigeria: 525 7 524 7.37 163,317,444 348,225 14,000 India: 453 6 459 ? 1,257,421,714 2,924,237 35,000 China (mainland only) 302 3 305
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 official population count of the various ethnic groups in Africa is highly uncertain due to limited infrastructure to perform censuses, and due to rapid population growth. Some groups have alleged that there is deliberate misreporting in order to give selected ethnicities numerical superiority (as in the case of Nigeria's Hausa, Fulani ...
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.
A Luo language, one of the major languages of Uganda. Dinka (1.4 million). The major ethnicity of South Sudan. Acholi (1.2 million). Another Luo language of Uganda. Nuer (1.1 million in 2011, significantly more today). The language of the Nuer, another numerous people from South Sudan and Ethiopia. Maasai (1.0 million).