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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.
After a short period (1984-1994) where Afrikaans and English were the two co-official languages of South Africa, Afrikaans has been one of eleven official languages since 1994. [ 17 ] Since 2012 a new language policy has been implemented where working languages of all government institutions were established.
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]
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.
Africa is the fastest growing continent, currently increasing by 2.35% per year as of 2021. [1] Africa is also the youngest continent, as 60% of Africa is 24 years of age or younger. [2] This list also includes the partially recognized country Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, commonly known as Western Sahara, which is a member of the African ...
The Niger–Congo languages constitute the largest language family spoken in West Africa and perhaps the world in terms of the number of languages. One of its salient features is an elaborate noun class system with grammatical concord .
Geographical distribution of Afrikaans in Namibia. South African census figures suggest a growing number of first language Afrikaans speakers in all nine provinces, a total of 6.85 million in 2011 compared to 5.98 million a decade earlier. [1] 2001 Namibian census reported that 11.4% of Namibians had Afrikaans as their home language.
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 ...