10 most spoken languages in the whole of Africa
Africa is home to about 2000 indigenous languages and boasts of a population of over 1.2 billion people who belong to different native tribes and ethnicity. As shown on the list, millions of Africans speak indigenous languages every day but except for Swahili and a few others, none is accepted as a formal means of communication.
Africans have embraced foreign languages and identities so much that our indigenous languages have been termed ‘vernacular’ and widely unacceptable in public places and corporates environments around the continent. Many critics argue that this further destroys the African identity which is desperately struggling to survive.
10. Zulu:
IsiZulu, also known as Zulu, is one of South Africa’s official languages. Branching out from the Bantu/Nguni family of languages, Zulu has more than 10 million speakers and is the second most widely spoken Bantu language after Shona.
9. Amharic:
The nineth most widely spoken language in Africa, Amharic is the second-largest Semitic dialect on the continent after Arabic and mainly spoken in Ethiopia. Amharic has 18 million native speakers and 3 million emigrants’ speakers
Being a native language, Amharic is one of the very few languages having its alphabet, while most others use Arabic or Latin letters.
8. Igbo:
A native language of the Igbo people and one of Nigeria’s official language, Igbo is spoken by over 24 million people, with the greater portion of speakers residing in Nigeria, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea.
Igbo has more than 20 dialects and descends from the Volta-Niger branch of the Niger-Congo family of language, with the Igbo people being one of the largest ethnic group in Africa.
7. Oromo:
Oromo is the linguistic literature of the early 20th century also called Galla. It is native to the Ethiopian state of Oromia and Northern Kenya and is spoken predominantly by the Oromo people and neighboring ethnic groups in the Horn of Africa. It is used as a lingua franca particularly in the Oromia Region in Ethiopia and northeastern Kenya.
6. Yoruba:
Yoruba is one of the cardinal languages of Nigeria, it is the third most spoken language in Nigeria after English and Hausa, and sixth in Africa, accounting for over 30 million speakers in Benin, Nigeria, and Togo, plus about 5 million second-language speakers.
5. Hausa:
Hausa, one of Nigeria’s official languages, and a member of the Chadic branch of Afro-Asiatic family of languages is spoken by more than 80 million Africans as their first language. Other than Nigeria, Hausa is spoken in Niger, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Togo, Ghana, and Chad.
Hausa makes it to the list of most spoken languages in Africa due to its significance in trade, commerce and business across Nigeria and the West African region.
4. French:
French comes fourth on the list; this means there are more French speakers in Africa than in France. French is an European language that saw the light of Africa after the Colonization period. Not surprisingly, 26 African states form part of the top French-speaking countries on the continent.
In some areas, such as Abidjan, Mauritius, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, Sao Tome e Principe, Seychelles, Guinea and Gabon, French is spoken in the highest percentage.
3. Arabic:
The presence of Arabic in the languages spoken in Africa may come as a surprise to many, being that it is a foreign language. Again, this shows the level of external influences on the continent. Arabic is spoken by more than 100 million Africans, making it the third most spoken language in the continent.
It is an official language in Egypt, Comoros, Djibouti, Chad, Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Sudan and Libya and is mostly concentrated in the North African region.
2. English:
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone – even after the British Empire’s withdrawal, the effects of colonialism remain. Many former British colonies now use English as their official language for government, education, and business. Others, like Rwanda, weren’t British colonies, but are urging citizens to learn English to communicate with other countries.
130 million of the approximately 1.2 billion people in Africa speak English. Residents of 23 African countries including Botswana, Burundi, Liberia, Malawi, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe speak English.
1. Swahili:
Swahili, which is also known as Kiswahili in the native tongue, is a Bantu language spoken by some 150 million Africans in the African Great Lakes region in Central and Southern Africa.
It is the official language in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Mozambique, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Swahili holds quite an appeal for many language learners owing to the wide number of people speaking this language and its rich history.
