Ciekawostka: More than 1,000 different languages are spoken on the continent of Africa

Evidence: 45 • authority: 80

A Thesaurus of African Languages: A Classified and Annotated Inventory of the Spoken Languages of Africa. With an Appendix on their Written Representation

Evidence: 45 • authority: 80

A Thesaurus of African Languages: A Classified and Annotated Inventory of the Spoken Languages of Africa. With an Appendix on their Written Representation

Evidence: 45 • authority: 72

Ethio-Semitic (also Ethiopian Semitic, Ethiosemitic, Ethiopic or Abyssinian) is a family of languages spoken in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Sudan in Northeast Africa and the Horn of Africa. They form the western branch of the South Semitic languages, itself a sub-branch of Semitic, part of the Afroasiatic language family. With 57,500,000 total speakers as of 2019, including around 25,100,000 second language speakers, Amharic is the most widely spoken of the group, the most widely spoken language of Ethiopia and second-most widely spoken Semitic language in the world after Arabic. Tigrinya has 7 million speakers and is the most widely spoken language in Eritrea. Tigre is the second-most spoken lan…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 72

The Afroasiatic languages (also known as the Afro-Asiatic, Afrasian, Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic languages) are a language family (or phylum) of about 400 languages spoken predominantly in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahara and Sahel. Over 500 million people are native speakers of an Afroasiatic language, constituting the fourth-largest language family after Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, and Niger–Congo. Most linguists divide the family into six branches: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Omotic, and Semitic. The vast majority of Afroasiatic languages are considered indigenous to the African continent, including all those not belonging to the Semitic…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 72

South Africa is a linguistically diverse country and has twelve official languages: Ndebele, Sepedi, Sotho, South African Sign Language, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, and English, which is the primary language used in parliamentary and state discourse, though all official languages are equal in legal status. The eleven official spoken languages were first recognised in the 1996 Constitution of South Africa. South African Sign Language was recognised as the twelfth official language of South Africa by the National Assembly on 3 May 2023. Unofficial languages are protected under the Constitution of South Africa, though few are mentioned by any name. Unofficial and marg…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 72

The number of languages natively spoken in Africa is variously estimated (depending on the delineation of language vs. dialect) at between 1,250 and 2,100, and by some counts at over 3,000. Nigeria alone has over 500 languages (according to SIL Ethnologue), one of the greatest concentrations of linguistic diversity in the world. The languages of Africa belong to many distinct language families, among which the largest are: Niger–Congo, which include the large Atlantic-Congo and Bantu branches in West, Central, Southeast and Southern Africa. Afroasiatic languages are spread throughout Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and parts of the Sahel. Saharan, Nilotic and Central Sudanic…

Evidence: 33 • authority: 80

Beads on a string? Representations of repetition in spoken and signed languages

Evidence: 33 • authority: 80

Maps of the Slavic Languages: Map 5: Spoken Languages

Evidence: 33 • authority: 80

A Corpus for spoken Afro-Asiatic Languages

Evidence: 33 • authority: 72

This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect. For example, while Arabic is sometimes considered a single language centred on Modern Standard Arabic, other authors consider its mutually unintelligible varieties separate languages. Similarly, Chinese is sometimes viewed as a single language because of a shared culture and common literary language, but sometimes considered multiple languages. Conversely, colloquial registers of Hindi and Urdu are almost completely mutually intelligible and are sometimes classified as one language, Hindustani. Rankings of languages should therefore be used with caution, as…

Evidence: — • authority: 35