Africa speaks over two thousand languages, making the continent home to a quarter of
all languages on Earth. South Africa alone has dozens of languages, Chad more than 100,
and in Nigeria people speak over 500 languages! How can we hope to understand such a multilingual continent?
Spend the next minutes with me, and let's try.
This iconic silhouette represents a continent four times the size of Australia,
three times as large as China or Canada, and over twice the area of Siberia,
which is the most ground I've yet covered in a single animation.
Now, face to face with such vast lands of varied people and languages, where and how do we start?
With... families. Language families that since ancient
times have lived, grown and branched in Africa.
Follow the Atlantic south of the Sahara, along the Gulf of Guinea, through to the basin of the
Congo River, East to Kenya and all the way down to South Africa. Here is a large and diverse group
of Niger-Congo languages. Perhaps a fifth of all the world's languages belong to just this one family,
including Wolof, and Twi, and two of Nigeria's most spoken languages,
Yoruba and Igbo. (But Hausa, you're from another family. We'll get to you.) Off on their own in Sudan, these pockets
get lumped together as Kordofanian, but watch out how you classify them. We'll come back to them, too.
Benue-Congo is a vast subgroup that spread
far south and east of the Benue River into the expansive Bantu languages.
This family shares the trait of sorting nouns into a dozen or more classes,
using suffixes or more often prefixes to categorize nouns into humans,
plants, animals, abstractions, positions... Even the name "Bantu" itself is a composed
word: ntu is the root, and ba- is the prefix for the human plural class.
Well inland, in the Sahara and down the Nile, linguists propose a family called Nilo-Saharan.
Have you ever heard of these languages, each spoken by millions of people: Luo? Kanuri? Songhai? More
familiar names might be the language of the Maasai or the Nubian languages, including Old Nubian.
The Kadu languages circled into Kordofanian sound Nilo-Saharan to some. This family is usually
tonal, actually the same goes for Niger-Congo, so you need to distinguish higher and lower pitches
to make meaningful words.
Along the north and east of the continent, there's a family we've run into before:
Afroasiatic. Think of ancient and modern Ethiopian Semitic languages like Ge'ez
and Amharic, the Cushitic languages, Egyptian, Amazigh throughout North Africa, and the languages
around the Omo River which, as you recall, are unique and hard to classify. The Semitic branch is well known
for reaching outside of Africa and boasting very old written languages. Some of Afroasiatic is even
tonal, like Hausa from the Chadic branch, which can change tone to mark grammar.
If Afroasiatic expanded out, on the flipside of the continent, one large family long ago
expanded in. Or more off of. Madagascar is this large island that native speakers of the Malagasy
language call home. They now speak dialects that trace their origins back to a single subbranch
of a single branch of the Austronesian language family.
So expect the kind of words and grammar you'd hear in Borneo, plus some Bantu borrowings.
Languages from the Kalahari Basin, and southward and westward, got grouped with Hadza and Sandawe
from East Africa into a single, ahem, "Khoisan" family. These languages are famous for their
click consonant sounds like /ǀ/, /ǂ/. Turns out people must like saying clicks,
because their Bantu-speaking neighbors even picked them up over time, as in isiZulu and Sesotho.
So in sum, five big language families. And that's it. Africa explained, right?
All this talk of families and branches... makes me feel like we need a reality check courtesy of
areal linguistics. If African genealogical linguistics talks about language families,
areal linguistics moves our focus to areas that share features, features languages have
not because of who their parents are but who their neighbors are. This approach makes sense
in a continent where people's experiences are often multilingual, practical and regional.
At this point I originally wanted to detour and share a whole bunch about West Africa, a big language
area with very interesting features. And also home to many newly inspired writing systems,
some of which gained traction. But today our main story picks up in southern Africa.
Because traits spreading due to contact instead of family relationships will be the undoing
of the five family story I told you. Starting with those "click languages". Clicks have been borrowed
throughout an area, and with comparison what once was named a single "Khoisan" family unravels into
many: Khoe, Kx'a and Tuu, famous for having the most clicks of all. Far away, Sandawe and
Hadza then look like isolates, unrelated to each other and to any of what's going on down south.
Wait... if the five families are unraveling, exactly how many distinct families are there in
Africa? Here goes one of those "it depends" answers. Are you a lumper or a splitter?
Keep shaking these family trees and even more uncertainties fall out. Remember Nilo-Saharan?
It undergoes a lot of scrutiny, sometimes tagged "hypothetical".
Pick it apart, and you'll find clear isolates like Chabu, and tough-to-call ones,
like do you think Songhai is its own group or part of the larger family? And say you
don't like the hypothesis at all, well then, you're left with a bunch of smaller families.
That's not the only old idea that has its share of detractors. They're coming after
Niger-Congo too. From breaking up Kordofanian, to doubting all languages that fall outside of
the broad Atlantic-Congo core. So do Mande peoples speak Niger-Congo languages or not?
Africa has many isolates and disputed families. Sometimes because they're obviously
unrelated. Sometimes because of all those debated classifications.
Sometimes because they're underattested, lack good documentation. It's true
of Africa's sign languages, too: many ultimately trace back to LSF or French Sign Language,
but many arose from their own local origins.
So at first glance Africa's languages seemed complicated, but we simplified them down to five
manageable, namable families, and now we realize they're getting complicated all over again.
And that's still not the full story. We're missing more recent colonizer and settler languages.
The effects of especially Indo-European and Arabic linguistic contact over time expand
our concept of African languages. Expand it inward as the languages become local:
Zairian French, Nigerian English, a Dutch variety becoming Afrikaans.
There are also pidgins and creoles. Some people feel like the two examples
you're looking at here are bad Arabic or broken Portuguese,
but no, linguistically they are creoles lexified by those languages.
Colonization also expands our understanding outward from Africa.
Colonizers forced African people, tongues, hands and the voices and signs they carried into the
waters across the globe, making a massive impact on language history. Their descendants in the
diaspora today speak former colonial languages, like English. Indigenous languages, like Garifuna.
And creole languages like Kreyòl Ayisyen or Papiamentu. And in all cases,
Africa's languages from those not-so-five families leave imprints on words, meaning and grammar.
In the end, yeah, there may be no one African language,
single quintessential family, place or people. Maybe with this time we've spent together we can
appreciate the many languages of Africa, and the peoples who speak them, better.
And if you want more, last year I put together this list full of creators
and channels who share more about this continent with the longest linguistic
history on earth. Please learn from them. And stick around and subscribe for language.