languages indigenous to the African continent. More than 1000 different languages are spoken in Africa. Apart from Arabic, which is not confined to Africa, the most widely spoken African tongues are Swahili and Hausa, each with more than 10 million speakers. Several languages (often inaccurately termed dialects simply because they have few users) are spoken by only a few thousand people. On the average, an African language has about 200,000 speakers; only a few dozen languages have more than 1 million speakers. Although very few African languages have written literatures, the majority have long-standing traditions of oral literature.

Language Groupings.

According to the most recent and widely accepted scholarly practice, the languages of Africa are grouped into four language families: Hamito-Semitic (or Afro-Asiatic), Nilo-Saharan, Khoisan, and Niger-Kordofanian. A language family is a group of related languages presumably derived from a common origin; a family is often further subdivided into branches composed of more closely related languages. At least some of the African linguistic families are believed to have a history of more than 5000 years. African languages that belong to different families are as little alike as English, Turkish, Chinese, and Navajo, although the disparate tongues may be spoken in the same locality. Even within a single family, African languages may be as different in sound and structure as English, Italian, Russian, and Hindi, all of which are members of the Indo-European language family. Within a given branch of one family, however, languages may frequently be as closely related to each other as German, Dutch, and Swedish.

Writing systems exist for only about half the languages of Africa, and in certain tongues the only written literature is a translation of some portion of the New Testament. Except for Arabic and certain languages of Ethiopia, the alphabets of most African languages are based on adaptations of the Roman alphabet and were introduced by missionaries. A few tribes, notably the Vai in Liberia and the Bamum in Cameroon, have developed their own syllabic writing systems.

The first European students of African languages were usually missionaries who, more than other groups, were interested in learning to speak with native populations and preparing literature for them. Much of the available information on African languages still comes from missionary sources. A major early work on African languages is the Polyglotta Africana, by the 19th-century missionary-teacher Sigismund W. Koelle (1823–1902); it contains a list of some 300 words and phrases in 156 different African languages. Koelle's information came from freed slaves living in the British West African protectorate of Sierra Leone. Twentieth-century scholars, such as the German linguists Carl Meinhof (1857–1944) and Diedrich Westermann (1875–1956), the South African linguist Clement Martyn Doke (1893–1980), and such British linguists as Ida Caroline Ward (1880–1949) and Malcolm Guthrie (1903–72), have made substantial contributions to the knowledge of African languages and the relationships of these languages to one another. The American linguist and anthropologist Joseph H. Greenberg (1915–2001) significantly revised earlier notions of the groupings of African languages, although some modifications and refinements of his 1963 classification can be expected from the increasing number of scholars in the field.

It is often suggested that the indigenous languages of Africa will eventually give way to internationally important European languages, or at least to a few of the major languages that are native to Africa. Despite an increasing number of African contacts with Europe and the U.S., however, most African languages are expected to continue in use over the next few centuries. As the continent develops, more and more speakers of minor languages will probably also learn at least one major African language and possibly a European language as well; but the use of the mother tongue in the family circle and in village and tribal affairs will without a doubt persist much longer than most people expect. The emergence of independent African states has been accompanied by a resurgence of interest and pride in the indigenous languages of Africa in many parts of the continent.

The Hamito-Semitic Family.

The Hamito-Semitic languages constitute the most important group of languages spoken in North Africa. The Semitic branch of the family includes languages spoken in Asia as well as in Africa. The Arabic language, the leading member of this branch, is the major language of North Africa and of the Republic of the Sudan. Amharic, which is spoken by more than 5 million people, is the official language of Ethiopia. The national book of Ethiopia, Kebra nagast (The Glory of the Kings), is written in ancient Ethiopic, or Ge^cez, now no longer spoken. Ge^cez literature also includes several books of the Apocrypha not preserved in any other language. Other Semitic languages spoken in North Africa include Tigrinya and Tigré in Eritrea.

Languages of the Berber branch of the Hamito-Semitic family are spoken by a substantial portion of the population of Morocco, Algiers, and Tunisia; by scattered groups elsewhere in North Africa; and along the southern fringes of the Sahara Desert in western Africa. The Cushitic branch, confined to Ethiopia, Somalia, and the Red Sea coast, includes such major languages as Galla and Somali. The ancient Egyptian language, which has no living descendant, was another branch of the Hamito-Semitic family (see also Coptic Language).

A number of languages spoken largely in northern Nigeria form another Hamito-Semitic grouping, known as the Chadic branch. By far the most important Chadic language is Hausa, one of the two most common languages of sub-Saharan Africa. Hausa is widely used in education and trade, even in regions far beyond its original borders. Several Hausa newspapers are published, and the body of Hausa literature is continually growing.

The Nilo-Saharan Family.

The Nilo-Saharan languages are found in a broken chain from the great bend of the Niger River in West Africa to Ethiopia, throughout most of the upper Nile valley, and in parts of Uganda and Kenya. The westernmost member of this family is Songhai, spoken along much of the upper Niger River. The Saharan branch of this family includes the languages spoken in northeastern Nigeria, through the Republic of Chad to the east, and into the oasis settlements of Libya to the north. Although most of this area is sparsely populated, Kanuri, the major language of the Saharan branch, is spoken by about 1.5 million people.

Languages of the Chari-Nile branch are spoken in the northern part of Chad, in the Sudan, in much of Uganda and Kenya, and in the northeastern corner of the Congo Republic. Along the Nile River near the southern border of Egypt and in scattered areas to the southwest are the Nubian languages, Chari-Nile languages spoken by about 1 million people. The Nubian alphabet was derived from that of the Coptic language. Nubian religious documents dating from the 8th to the 14th century form the only literature of a living African language that was written before the modern period. In the southern Sudan and in northern Uganda and Kenya, a group of languages known as Nilotic belongs to this branch; important representatives are Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, and Acholi (or Luo). Languages spoken farther to the southeast, including Masai in Kenya, have long been called Nilo-Hamitic; recent investigations, however, appear to prove that these tongues have no direct relationship to languages of the Hamito-Semitic family, but are most closely related to the Nilotic languages.

The very small Maban and Koman groups, and the single language Fur, also belong to the Nilo-Saharan family.

In many Nilo-Saharan languages, a system of noun suffixes indicates grammatical relationships; this system somewhat resembles the case system of Latin, but is quite unlike that of any other family of languages in Africa. In the northern Nilotic languages, similar grammatical relationships are expressed by an extremely complex system of internal vowel changes; many of the vowel sounds themselves are unusually difficult for the learner. Various verbal constructions are indicated by series of suffixes in some Nilo-Saharan languages (for example, Kanuri), or by both prefixes and suffixes in others (for example, the southern Nilotic languages). Many of these languages have a characteristic passive construction that is used much more freely than its counterpart in English. For example, “He bought cloth” is usually expressed as “Cloth was bought by him.” This sentence can be shortened to “Cloth was bought.” The action (buying) and the object (cloth) form the basic part of the sentence; the person who performed the action is comparatively unimportant.

The Khoisan Family.

The Khoisan (or Click) languages comprise by all odds the smallest language family in Africa, with probably no more than 100,000 speakers altogether. Most of these languages are spoken by the Khoikhoi and San peoples of southern Africa; the largest of them is Nama, with about 25,000 speakers. Far to the northeast in Tanzania are two other representatives of this family: Sandawe, with about 23,000 speakers, and the much smaller Hadza. The Khoisan languages are best known for the unusual click consonants characteristic of most of them; in some Khoisan languages nearly every word begins with a click. The production of these sounds involves a sucking action of the tongue; by the positioning of the tongue and the way air is released into the mouth, distinctive kinds of clicks are produced. When these languages are written, the clicks are represented either by otherwise unused letters such as C, Q, X, or by special symbols such as /, !, //. Some of the Khoisan languages have a system of grammatical gender, which is found elsewhere in Africa only in the Hamito-Semitic family.

The Niger-Kordofanian Family.

This family includes two subfamilies, Niger-Congo and Kordofanian. Of these, the Kordofanian languages number only about 30, all small; they are found in a small area of the Nuba hills in the southern Sudan, surrounded by languages of the Nilo-Saharan family and by Arabic. The Niger-Congo linguistic area, on the other hand, comprises almost all of the African continent below the Sahara Desert. Although migrations presumably separated certain branches of the Niger-Congo subfamily more than 5000 years ago, languages in each of the branches have similar words for many common objects and actions; the still more distantly related Kordofanian languages have a few such similar words and show some striking resemblances to the Niger-Congo languages in grammatical structure. In contrast to the small number of speakers in the Kordofanian subfamily, about three out of four African natives speak languages that belong to the Niger-Congo subfamily.

In this subfamily a relationship exists among most of the languages of southern and central Africa that has been recognized for more than a century. These languages have become widely known as Bantu (a word meaning “the people” in many languages of the group). Some of the more important Bantu languages are Zulu and Xhosa in South Africa; Makua in Mozambique; Nyanja in Malawi; Shona in Zimbabwe; Bemba in Zambia; Kimbundu and Umbundu in Angola; Swahili and Sukuma in Tanzania; Kikuyu in Kenya; Ganda in Uganda; Rwanda in Rwanda; Rundi in Burundi; Ngala and Kongo in the Congo Republic and Congo (Zaire); and Fang and Bulu in Cameroon. Some Bantu authors are now beginning to produce literature in their native languages.

The Bantu languages do not constitute a separate family, but should logically be grouped with certain languages of Nigeria, such as Tiv and Birom. All these languages together are classified as the Benue-Congo branch of the Niger-Congo subfamily. The Benue-Congo is by far the largest branch; the Bantu section alone numbers more speakers than all the rest of the Niger-Congo languages combined.

North of the Bantu language area, in the northern Congo region and adjacent territory, is a second branch of the Niger-Congo subfamily, the Adamawa-Eastern branch. Its largest members are Zande and Ngbandi; a dialect of Ngbandi known as Sango is widely used as an intertribal language in the Central African Republic and is growing in importance.

From Nigeria west, five additional branches of the Niger-Congo subfamily, which have frequently been called West Sundanic languages, are found. A group of three or four closely related languages in the Niger delta, which together are known as Ijo, constitutes one of the five branches of the subfamily.

In a strip along the west coast from southeastern Nigeria to Liberia are found the languages of the Kwa branch. This branch includes such important languages as Efik, Igbo, and Yoruba in Nigeria; Ewe in Togo and Ghana; Fanti and Twi in Ghana; Anyi and Baule in Côte d'Ivoire; and Bassa and Kru in Liberia. Several of these languages are used in schools, and a small but growing body of published literature exists.

North of the Kwa language region, extending from western Nigeria into much of Côte d'Ivoire and Mali, are the languages of the Gur branch, including Moré in Burkina Faso, with about 2 million speakers.

Along the Atlantic coast, from Liberia to the desert north of Dakar, are several languages of the West Atlantic branch. These include Temne in Sierra Leone, Wolof in the vicinity of Dakar, and Fula (also known as Fulani, Fulfulde, or Peulh), by far the most widely spoken of the branch. The two large concentrations of Fulani-speaking people are located in Guinea and eastern Nigeria and Cameroon. Between these widely separated areas, Fulani-speaking people are spread out in numerous camps in which they raise cattle and sell meat, milk, and butter to neighboring tribes. Fulani is not, as has sometimes been thought, a Hamitic language.

Speakers of languages of the Mande branch inhabit most of the remaining portion of West Africa. One Mande language, known in various areas as Malinke, Maninka, Mandingo, Bambara, and Dyula, is spoken by some 3 million people from Senegal through much of Mali and northern Guinea and into northern Côte d'Ivoire. Other important Mande languages are Mende in Sierra Leone and Kpelle in Liberia. Small islands of Mande-language speakers are also scattered through areas farther east, as far as western Nigeria. The name Mandekan has recently been proposed as a name for the language as a whole and has gained substantial acceptance. The Mande languages are believed to be the oldest offshoots of the parent Niger-Congo language spoken more than 5000 years ago.

Bantu Grammar.

The Bantu languages, now recognized as part of one branch of the Niger-Congo subfamily, have a system of noun classification that was formerly considered unique. In Swahili, a Bantu tongue, one group of nouns has a prefix m to indicate the singular and a prefix wa to indicate the plural; for example, mtoto (“a child”), watoto (“children”). Another group of nouns has a singular prefix ki and a plural prefix vi; for example, kikapu (“a basket”), vikapu (“baskets”). Words modifying a noun require corresponding prefixes; for example, mtu mzuri (“a good person”), watu wazuri (“good people”), kikapu kizuri (“a good basket”), vikapu vizuri (“good baskets”). Corresponding prefixes for some modifiers, and corresponding pronouns meaning “he,” “she,” “it,” or “they,” are not identical with the noun prefixes in all cases. Each set of prefixes and pronouns, whether singular or plural or neutral (such as the prefix u in uhuru, “freedom”), defines a class of nouns and its grammatical concords. A typical Bantu language may have from 12 to more than 20 noun classes.

Classification systems of the type described in the preceding paragraph are actually characteristic of languages belonging to all branches of the Niger-Congo subfamily except the Mande branch, and also of languages in the Kordofanian subfamily; this type of system was presumably present in the parent Niger-Kordofanian language thousands of years ago. Some languages of the Gur branch indicate the noun class by both prefix and suffix, and others by suffix only, but all have separate pronouns for each class, as do the Bantu languages. Many of the Kwa languages have noun prefixes, but no other characteristics of a class system. Some striking similarities are found throughout the Niger-Congo subfamily: for example, a class indicator such as m with words for oil, water, and other liquids.

Although grammatical structure among the Niger-Kordofanian languages varies considerably, in general these tongues emphasize the kind of action referred to (grammatical aspect), or the attitude toward the action (mode), rather than the time of the action (tense). Different constructions may indicate customary action (“He laughs all the time”), potential action (“He is likely to get sick”), experiential action (“He has met the chief”), hortative attitude (“He should go”), desiderative attitude (“If only he would come”), and so on. In many languages, the only construction referring primarily to time is one for the past tense. Such constructions, for which English often uses long phrases, are distinguished in Niger-Kordofanian languages by a single prefix, suffix, or particle, or even by a slight modification of a pronoun or verb form. On the other hand, passive constructions are rare or nonexistent in the non-Bantu languages of this family. Prepositions are also rare; ideas of motion (“to, from, up”) are typically incorporated in verbs, while ideas of location (“under, beside, in”) are typically incorporated in nouns.

Tonality.

With few exceptions, the languages of the Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Kordofanian, and Khoisan families, as well as the Chadic languages and a few of the Cushitic languages in the Hamito-Semitic family, are tone languages—that is, distinctions in the pitch of a single syllable may differentiate completely different words or different grammatical functions of a word or of a prefix or suffix. For example, in a dialect of Jukun, a language of Nigeria, kwi with a high pitch means “knife,” kwi with an intermediate pitch means “millstone,” and kwi with a low pitch means “chicken.” In the same dialect, ku bi with both syllables on an intermediate pitch means “He came,” but ku bi with the first syllable on a high pitch means “Have him come.” In scores of Niger-Congo languages, different pronouns may differ only in pitch. Distinctions in pitch or tone have generally been ignored in writing, although they are often crucial to understanding what the writer intended to say; tone is indicated by accent marks or other devices in only a relatively few modern grammars and dictionaries of African languages.

Other Language Families.

Two other language families, Indo-European and Malayo-Polynesian, are represented to some degree in Africa. The former group includes Afrikaans and English, both native to many people in the Republic of South Africa and Zimbabwe. English is also indigenous to Liberia, having been introduced there by repatriated American blacks in the 19th century. Malagasy, the language of the island of Madagascar, is a member of the Malayo-Polynesian group.

Before 1959, academic involvement in African language studies was confined to a very few universities in England and Europe. Since then, a number of American universities, as well as the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State, have begun teaching and research programs focused on African languages. With less emphasis on the implications of scientific linguistics for teaching and research, a number of other universities, colleges, and even high schools offer practical instruction in a single African language, usually Swahili.         W.E.W., WILLIAM E. WELMERS, Th.M., Ph.D.

For further information on this topic, see the Bibliography, sections 351. Linguistics, 856. African literature.