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.