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In Sub-Saharan Africa, most official languages at the national level tend to be colonial languages such as French, Portuguese, or English. [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ] The African Union declared 2006 the "Year of African Languages".
The ethnic groups of Africa number in the thousands, with each ethnicity generally having its own language (or dialect of a language) and culture. The ethnolinguistic groups include various Afroasiatic , Khoisan , Niger-Congo , and Nilo-Saharan populations.
An estimated 2,500–3,000 years ago (1000 BC to 500 BC), speakers of the Proto-Bantu language began a series of migrations eastward and southward, carrying agriculture with them. This Bantu expansion came to dominate Sub-Saharan Africa east of Cameroon, an area where Bantu peoples now constitute nearly the entire population.
The writing systems of Africa refer to the current and historical practice of writing systems on the African continent, both indigenous and those introduced. In many African societies, history generally used to be recorded orally despite most societies having developed a writing script, leading to them being termed "oral civilisations" in ...
African French ( French: français africain) is the generic name of the varieties of the French language spoken by an estimated 167 million people in Africa in 2023 or 51% of the French-speaking population of the world [6] [7] [8] spread across 34 countries and territories. [Note 1] This includes those who speak French as a first or second ...
[citation needed] Today, Hausa is the most widely spoken language in West Africa; although its speakers are mainly concentrated in the traditional Hausa heartland, it functions as the lingua franca of Nigeria's multilingual Middle Belt, including the capital of Abuja, and is also widely spoken in understood in other countries, especially ...
The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of around 210 African languages [1] spoken by somewhere around 70 million speakers, [1] mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet. The languages extend through 17 nations in the northern half of Africa ...
Niger–Congo is a hypothetical language family spoken over the majority of sub-Saharan Africa. [1] It unites the Mande languages, the Atlantic–Congo languages (which share a characteristic noun class system), and possibly several smaller groups of languages that are difficult to classify.