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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
Worldwide, Afrikaans and Dutch as native or second language are spoken by approximately 46 million people. There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages, [1] [2] [3] particularly in written form.
Nigeria alone has over 500 languages (according to SIL Ethnologue), [3] one of the greatest concentrations of linguistic diversity in the world. The languages of Africa belong to many distinct language families, among which the largest are:
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]
In South Africa, an Afrikaner minority party, the National Party, came to power in 1948 and enacted a series of segregationist laws favouring White people known as apartheid, meaning "separateness". These laws allowed for the systematic persecution of opposition leaders and attempted to enforce general white supremacy by classifying all South ...
Except for some elders living in rural areas, most Maasai people speak the official languages of Kenya and Tanzania—Swahili and English. [ 6 ] The Maasai population has been reported as numbering 1,189,522 in Kenya in the 2019 census, [ 1 ] compared to 377,089 in the 1989 census, though many Maasai view the census as government meddling and ...
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]