African Languages

I

Introduction

African Languages, languages indigenous to the African continent. More than 2,000 different languages are spoken in Africa. Apart from Arabic, which is not confined to Africa, the most widely spoken African tongues are Swahili (35 million speakers) and Hausa (39 million), both of which are used over wide areas as lingua francas. Several languages (often inaccurately termed dialects simply because they have few users or are under-researched) are spoken by only a few thousand people. Although very few African languages have written literatures, the majority have long-standing traditions of oral literature.

II

Language Groupings

According to the most recent and widely accepted scholarly practice, the languages of Africa are grouped into four language families: Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Khoisan, and Niger-Congo. A language family is a group of related languages presumably derived from a common origin; a family is often 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 5,000 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 often be as closely related as German, Dutch, and Swedish.

Not all the African languages have writing systems, 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; 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 and Diedrich Westermann, the South African linguist Clement Martyn Doke, and such British linguists as Ida Caroline Ward and Malcolm Guthrie, 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 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 has been 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 native to Africa. However, despite the huge increase in contacts between Africa and the West during the 20th century, especially during the latter half of the century, most African languages show no signs of dying out. This is because, except in the remotest areas, Africans have traditionally spoken not only their birth tongue but also a local or regional lingua franca, such as Hausa, Swahili, or Arabic, associated with trade. During the 20th century, as access to education, and radio and television increased, European languages also became understood and spoken by an increasing number of Africans. The most widely spoken are English, French, and Portuguese, the languages of the main former colonial powers; in some African countries they have been formally encouraged as a lingua franca, or have become incorporated into pidgin or creole languages developed as local lingua francas, such as Fanagolo in the southern African mines. The post-colonial period has also been characterized by a resurgence of interest and pride in the indigenous languages of Africa in many parts of the continent.

III

The Afro-Asiatic Family

The almost 400 Afro-Asiatic languages (formerly known as Hamito-Semitic) constitute the most important group of languages spoken in northern Africa. The Semitic branch of the family includes languages spoken in Asia as well as in Africa, hence the revised name. The many Arabic languages, the leading members of this branch, are the major languages of North Africa and of the Republic of Sudan. Amharic (see Semitic Languages), which is spoken by around 21 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'ez, now no longer spoken. Ge^'ez literature also includes several books of the Apocrypha not preserved in any other language. Other Semitic languages spoken in North Africa include Tigrigna and Tigre in Eritrea and Ethiopia.

Languages of the Berber branch of the Afro-Asiatic family are spoken by a substantial portion of the population in Morocco, Algeria, 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, Eritrea, Somalia, Kenya, Sudan, and Tanzania, includes such major languages as Oromo and Somali. The ancient Egyptian language, which has no living descendant, forms another branch of the Afro-Asiatic family on its own (see Coptic Language).

A number of languages spoken largely in northern Nigeria form another Afro-Asiatic 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. A number of Hausa newspapers are published and there is a considerable body of Hausa literature.

IV

The Nilo-Saharan Family

The around 200 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 branch of this family is Songhai, an important language group with no close relatives, spoken along much of the upper Niger River in Mali and Niger. The Saharan branch of this family includes languages spoken in north-eastern Nigeria, through the Republic of Chad to the east, and into the oasis settlements of Libya to the north.

Along the River Nile near the southern border of Egypt and in scattered areas to the south-west 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 (see Nubia). In 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 south-east, including Maasai 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 Afro-Asiatic family, but are most closely related to the Nilotic languages.

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.