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Principal language families of the world (and in some cases geographic groups of families). 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.
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
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]
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.
The larger of the individual Bantu groups have populations of several million, e.g. the Baganda [5] people of Uganda (5.5 million as of 2014), the Shona of Zimbabwe (17.6 million as of 2020), the Zulu of South Africa (14.2 million as of 2016), the Luba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (28.8 million as of 2010), the Sukuma of Tanzania (10 ...
Statistics South Africa estimated a net 304,112 white residents left the country over the years 1986–2000 with another 341,000 over the period 2001–2016. [117] This emigration is the source of a notable Afrikaner diaspora today.
Africa has 32 French-speaking countries, more than half its total (53); [citation needed] French was also the most widely spoken language in Africa in 2015. [15]However, Nigeria, the most populous country on the continent, is predominantly English speaking.
Many Bantu languages borrow words from each other, and some are mutually intelligible. [4] Some of the languages are spoken by a very small number of people, for example the Kabwa language was estimated in 2007 to be spoken by only 8500 people but was assessed to be a distinct language. [5]