Lifestyle

Most Spoken Languages in Africa

Published

1 year ago

2023/01/19

Balogun Kamilu Lekan

1. Swahili

With over 100 million speakers, Swahili is Africa’s most spoken language. It is a Bantu language that is thought to have evolved from other languages, primarily Arabic, due to historical interactions between Arabs from the Middle East and East Africans.

Tanzania’s official language and the medium of instruction in all schools is Swahili. It is also the official language of Kenya and Uganda. Rwanda, Burundi, southern Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, northern Mozambique, and the Comoros Islands are also Swahili-speaking countries.

2. Amharic

The national language of Ethiopia, Amharic, has about 21 million native speakers and is the second most often used tongue after Oromo. More than 2 million Ethiopians who reside outside of their nation speak it, making it the second most widely spoken Semitic language in the world after Arabic.

The Afroasiatic language family, which has Middle Eastern roots, includes the Semitic languages. The most widely used Semitic languages in the world by native speakers are Tigrinya, Amharic, Arabic, and Arabic.

3. Yoruba

With approximately 30 million native speakers in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo, Yoruba is one of West Africa’s most widely spoken languages and one of Nigeria’s official languages. Many West African immigrants to the US and the UK speak it fluently.

It has more than fifteen varieties, including Awori, Ijesha, Ilaje, and Ila, and is the mother tongue of the Yoruba people of Nigeria. It belongs to the Volta-Niger branch of the Niger-Congo family of languages and has three tones: high, mid, and low.

4. Oromo

Over 30 million people in the Horn of Africa speak Oromo, primarily in Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, and Egypt. The Oromo people comprise more than 40% of Ethiopia’s population and are the country’s largest ethnic group. Under the Mengistu regime, writing the language was prohibited between 1974 and 1991, though limited use of the Ge’ez script was permitted. After 1991, the language adopted the Latin alphabet. It belongs to the Afroasiatic language family’s Cushitic branch.

5. Hausa

Over 40 million people use Hausa as a first or second language, making it one of the continent’s most widely used Chadic languages and one of Nigeria’s official languages. It was developed as the Hausa language of northern Nigeria and southern Niger and quickly became the dominant tongue of western Africa due to trade.

It is primarily spoken in northern Nigeria, Niger, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, CAR, Congo, Eritrea, Germany, Ghana, Sudan, Togo, and a large portion of North Africa. Its writing system combines the Latin and Boko alphabets, and most Muslim communities in western Africa speak it as their native tongue.