African Languages

V

The Khoisan Family

The Khoisan (or Click) languages comprise the smallest language family in Africa, with only around 200,000 speakers of the 30 or so languages altogether. Most of these languages are spoken by the Khoikhoi and San peoples of southern Africa; the largest of them is Nama. Far to the north-east in Tanzania are two other representatives of this family: Sandawe and the much smaller Hadza (800 speakers). 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 /, //, !, “, and [, as can be seen in the name of the language =/kx'au//'ein, spoken in Namibia and Botswana. Some of the Khoisan languages have a system of grammatical gender, which is found elsewhere in Africa only in the Afro-Asiatic family.

VI

The Niger-Congo Family

The largest African languages family comprising over 1,400 languages, this family includes several subfamilies, including Kordofanian, Mande, and Atlantic-Congo, which is further subcategorized into subfamilies including Benue-Congo, Atlantic, Gur, Kwa, and Ijoid. Of these, the Kordofanian languages number only 31, all with small populations; they are found in a small area of the Nuba hills in southern Sudan, surrounded by languages of the Nilo-Saharan family and by Arabic. The Atlantic-Congo linguistic area, on the other hand, comprises almost all of the African continent south of the Sahara Desert. Although migrations presumably separated certain branches of this subfamily more than 5,000 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 Atlantic-Congo languages in grammatical structure.

In the Benue-Congo 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 Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and Fang and Bulu in Cameroon. Bantu-speaking authors have developed a vibrant literary tradition in their indigenous languages over the past 50 years.

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 part of the Benue-Congo subfamily. Also from this branch are important languages such as Yoruba (22 million speakers), Igbo (18 million), and Efik (2.4 million) in Nigeria.

North of the Bantu language area, in the north of the Republic of the Congo and adjacent territory, is a branch of the Volta-Congo subfamily, the North branch. Its largest branches are Zande and Ngbandi languages; an Ngbandi-based creole known as Sango is widely used as a lingua franca in the Central African Republic, and is growing in importance. Extending from western Nigeria into much of Côte d'Ivoire and Mali, are the languages of the Gur branch, including Mòoré in Burkina Faso, with about 5 million speakers.

In a strip along the west coast from south-eastern Nigeria to Liberia are found the languages of the Kwa branch. This branch includes such important languages as Ewe in Togo and Ghana; Akan in Ghana; and Anyin in Côte d'Ivoire. Some of these languages are used in schools, and a small but growing body of published literature exists.

Along the Atlantic coast, from Liberia to the desert north of Dakar, are several languages of the Atlantic branch. These include Themne in Sierra Leone, Wolof in the vicinity of Dakar, and Fulani, a group of nine closely related languages, by far the most widely spoken. The three large concentrations of Fulani-speaking people are in Guinea (Jalon Fuuta), eastern Nigeria (Nigerian Fulfulde), and Senegal (Pulaar). Between these widely separated areas, Fulani-speaking people live in small groups; traditionally they are semi-nomadic pastoralists, living in numerous camps in which they raise their cattle and sell meat, milk, and butter to neighbouring peoples. Fulani is not, as has sometimes been thought, from the Afro-Asiatic language family.

Speakers of languages of the Mande branch inhabit most of the remaining portion of West Africa. One Mande language, known as Bambara, is spoken by up to 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 Mande languages are believed to be the oldest offshoots of the parent Niger-Congo language spoken more than 5,000 years ago.

VII

Bantu Grammar

The Bantu languages, now recognized as part of one branch of the Benue-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.

This type of classification system was presumably present in the parent Niger-Congo language thousands of years ago, as many subfamilies of the Niger-Congo phylum have these characteristics. 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.

Although grammatical structure among the Niger-Congo languages varies considerably, in general these tongues emphasize the kind of action referred to (grammatical aspect), or the attitude towards 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-Congo 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 non-existent 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.

VIII

Tonality

With few exceptions, the languages of the Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo, and Khoisan families, as well as the Chadic languages and a few of the Cushitic languages in the Afro-Asiatic 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 (this is in contrast to stress languages). For example, in Yoruba, a Nigerian language, the word ogun has nine different meanings according to the tone that is used. Ogun with a low to lower pitch means “he/she climbed”, with a low rising to high pitch means “war”, with an intermediate pitch means “medicine”, with an intermediate rising pitch means “twenty” or “inheritance”, with intermediate to high (sustained) pitch means “long”, and with a high to low pitch means “he/she stabbed”. In scores of Niger-Congo languages, certain words may differ in pitch alone. 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.

Some African languages (mainly tonal ones) make use of whistle speech, where each phoneme (the smallest units of sound that carry meaning) can be whistled according to the pitch variation patterns of the language, thus meaning is conveyed. Whistle speech enables speakers to communicate across long distances and can also be used for secrecy. The tonal languages of some African peoples are also represented by talking drums, used in music and for distance communication. Alterations in the pitch of the drum beats correspond to those in tonal languages such as Yoruba.

IX

Other Language Families

Two other language families, Indo-European and Austronesian, are represented to some degree in Africa. Malagasy, the language of the island of Madagascar, is a member of the Austronesian group. The Indo-European 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. While indigenous languages are spoken across Africa, many African countries have European languages (relics of colonialism) as their official language, used in business, education, governmental institutions, and other official domains.

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 United States Department of State, have begun teaching and research programmes focused on African languages. In London, England, The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) has the largest group of scholars in Europe dedicated to the study of African languages and culture. With less emphasis on the implications of scientific linguistics for teaching and research, a number of other universities and colleges around the world offer practical instruction in a single African language, often Swahili.

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.