Africa speaks over two thousand languages,
making the continent home to a quarter of all languages on Earth. South Africa alone
has dozens of languages, Chad more than 100, and in Nigeria people speak over 500 languages! How can we
hope to understand such a multilingual continent? Spend the next minutes with me, and let's try. This iconic silhouette represents a
continent four times the size of Australia, three times as large as China or Canada,
and over twice the area of Siberia, which is the most ground I've yet
covered in a single animation. Now, face to face with such vast lands of varied
people and languages, where and how do we start? With... families. Language
families that since ancient times have lived, grown and branched in Africa. Follow the Atlantic south of the Sahara, along
the Gulf of Guinea, through to the basin of the Congo River, East to Kenya and all the way down
to South Africa. Here is a large and diverse group of Niger-Congo languages. Perhaps a fifth of all
the world's languages belong to just this one family, including Wolof, and Twi, and two
of Nigeria's most spoken languages, Yoruba and Igbo. (But Hausa, you're from another
family. We'll get to you.) Off on their own in Sudan, these pockets get lumped together as Kordofanian, but watch out how you classify them. We'll come back to them, too. Benue-Congo is a vast subgroup that spread far south and east of the Benue
River into the expansive Bantu languages. This family shares the trait of sorting
nouns into a dozen or more classes, using suffixes or more often prefixes
to categorize nouns into humans, plants, animals, abstractions, positions...
Even the name "Bantu" itself is a composed word: ntu is the root, and ba- is the
prefix for the human plural class. Well inland, in the Sahara and down the Nile,
linguists propose a family called Nilo-Saharan. Have you ever heard of these languages, each spoken
by millions of people: Luo? Kanuri? Songhai? More familiar names might be the language of the Maasai
or the Nubian languages, including Old Nubian. The Kadu languages circled into Kordofanian sound
Nilo-Saharan to some. This family is usually tonal, actually the same goes for Niger-Congo, so
you need to distinguish higher and lower pitches to make meaningful words. Along the north and east of the continent,
there's a family we've run into before: Afroasiatic. Think of ancient and modern
Ethiopian Semitic languages like Ge'ez and Amharic, the Cushitic languages, Egyptian,
Amazigh throughout North Africa, and the languages around the Omo River which, as you recall, are unique and
hard to classify. The Semitic branch is well known for reaching outside of Africa and boasting very
old written languages. Some of Afroasiatic is even tonal, like Hausa from the Chadic branch,
which can change tone to mark grammar. If Afroasiatic expanded out, on the flipside
of the continent, one large family long ago expanded in. Or more off of. Madagascar is this
large island that native speakers of the Malagasy language call home. They now speak dialects that
trace their origins back to a single subbranch of a single branch of the Austronesian language family. So expect the kind of words and grammar you'd
hear in Borneo, plus some Bantu borrowings. Languages from the Kalahari Basin, and southward
and westward, got grouped with Hadza and Sandawe from East Africa into a single, ahem, "Khoisan"
family. These languages are famous for their click consonant sounds like /ǀ/, /ǂ/.
Turns out people must like saying clicks, because their Bantu-speaking neighbors even picked
them up over time, as in isiZulu and Sesotho. So in sum, five big language families.
And that's it. Africa explained, right? All this talk of families and branches... makes
me feel like we need a reality check courtesy of areal linguistics. If African genealogical
linguistics talks about language families, areal linguistics moves our focus to areas
that share features, features languages have not because of who their parents are but who
their neighbors are. This approach makes sense in a continent where people's experiences are
often multilingual, practical and regional. At this point I originally wanted to detour and
share a whole bunch about West Africa, a big language area with very interesting features. And also
home to many newly inspired writing systems, some of which gained traction. But today
our main story picks up in southern Africa. Because traits spreading due to contact
instead of family relationships will be the undoing of the five family story I told you. Starting with
those "click languages". Clicks have been borrowed throughout an area, and with comparison what once
was named a single "Khoisan" family unravels into many: Khoe, Kx'a and Tuu, famous for having
the most clicks of all. Far away, Sandawe and Hadza then look like isolates, unrelated to each
other and to any of what's going on down south. Wait... if the five families are unraveling,
exactly how many distinct families are there in Africa? Here goes one of those "it depends"
answers. Are you a lumper or a splitter? Keep shaking these family trees and even more
uncertainties fall out. Remember Nilo-Saharan? It undergoes a lot of scrutiny,
sometimes tagged "hypothetical". Pick it apart, and you'll find clear
isolates like Chabu, and tough-to-call ones, like do you think Songhai is its own group
or part of the larger family? And say you don't like the hypothesis at all, well then,
you're left with a bunch of smaller families. That's not the only old idea that has its
share of detractors. They're coming after Niger-Congo too. From breaking up Kordofanian,
to doubting all languages that fall outside of the broad Atlantic-Congo core. So do Mande
peoples speak Niger-Congo languages or not? Africa has many isolates and disputed
families. Sometimes because they're obviously unrelated. Sometimes because
of all those debated classifications. Sometimes because they're underattested,
lack good documentation. It's true of Africa's sign languages, too: many ultimately
trace back to LSF or French Sign Language, but many arose from their own local origins. So at first glance Africa's languages seemed
complicated, but we simplified them down to five manageable, namable families, and now we
realize they're getting complicated all over again. And that's still not the full story. We're missing
more recent colonizer and settler languages. The effects of especially Indo-European and
Arabic linguistic contact over time expand our concept of African languages. Expand
it inward as the languages become local: Zairian French, Nigerian English,
a Dutch variety becoming Afrikaans. There are also pidgins and creoles.
Some people feel like the two examples you're looking at here are bad
Arabic or broken Portuguese, but no, linguistically they are creoles
lexified by those languages.
Colonization also expands our
understanding outward from Africa. Colonizers forced African people, tongues, hands
and the voices and signs they carried into the waters across the globe, making a massive impact
on language history. Their descendants in the diaspora today speak former colonial languages,
like English. Indigenous languages, like Garifuna. And creole languages like Kreyòl
Ayisyen or Papiamentu. And in all cases, Africa's languages from those not-so-five families
leave imprints on words, meaning and grammar. In the end, yeah, there may
be no one African language, single quintessential family, place or people.
Maybe with this time we've spent together we can appreciate the many languages of Africa,
and the peoples who speak them, better. And if you want more, last year I put
together this list full of creators and channels who share more about this
continent with the longest linguistic history on earth. Please learn from them.
And stick around and subscribe for language.
Thanks for sharing this. I enjoyed it. I never tire of African history, culture or linguistics. I usually end up learning something new.