The people of Africa use more than eight hundred languages in everyday conversation, which are very different from each other and at the same time have much in common. The dialects of the hottest continent in the world are grouped into 4 families: Afrasian, Nigerian-Congolese (formerly West Sudanese), Nilo-Sahara and Bushmen. One of the main African languages is called Swahili. In East Africa, 150 million people speak this dialect.
Afrasian family
Phonetics is characterized by the absence of tones that are present in other widespread dialects. It is also worth noting the frequently encountered laryngeal and pharyngeal consonants and consonant groups, rarely used in other languages.
As for grammatical features, the words and sentences of this group are characterized by categories of the genus in the pronoun, correlated with sexual characteristics; various ways of plural formation for names (reduction, suffixation and alternation of vowels within words) and arbitrary verb forms (passive, causative, reflexive and others). Each African language, which is part of the Semitic branch of the Afrasian family, is characterized by the presence of three consonant roots.
Dialects of this group are widespread among the peoples of North Africa. They also dominate in the east of the continent, namely in Ethiopia, mainland Tanzania, in Somalia and the Middle East. The Afrasian family includes five branches: Ancient Egyptian, Cushite, Semitic, Berber and Chad. The latter includes one of the main African languages - Hausa.
Nilo-Sahara family
The dialects of this group are tonal without noun classes, although some of them have two grammatical genders. The African language of the Nilo-Sahara family includes verbs that have a set of arbitrary forms. Sometimes a name uses its case system.
Important divisions of this group are the Shar-Nile and Sahara subfamilies. The latter includes such dialects as Kanuri (used in the native kingdom of Bornu), as well as Daza and Teda, spoken by the population of the eastern Sahara.
Nigerian-Congolese family
A distinctive feature of the grammatical structure of the dialects of this group are noun classes, expressed by various affixes for the plural and singular. The African language, belonging to the Nigerian-Congolese family, has pronouns and adjectives consistent with nouns in the class to which they are assigned. Also, the dialects of this group, unlike the European ones, have a huge number of nominal classes instead of three genera (feminine, masculine and middle). Thus, animals belong to one class, people to another, and, for example, trees to the third. However, there are some groups that do not have a basis for semantic classification.
Roughly the Niger-Congolese family is divided into 8 subfamilies. These are Atlantic, Mandingo, Kwa, Ijo, Voltaic, Eastern, Adamaua and Benue Congo. The last branch includes the most used and well-known African language - Swahili.
Snapping tongues
This language family (formerly Bushmen) got its name due to peculiar clicking notes, which are used as consonants and are used exclusively in Africa. The articulatory interpretation of these sounds is ambiguous: now they are called non-respiratory, since they are produced practically without using the lungs, with the help of sucking movements. That is, they are opposed to implosive and explosive consonants.
The first of the three groups into which the Bushman family is divided is called Khoisan. Its languages are widely spoken in South Africa. In turn, the Khoisan subfamily is divided into northern, southern and central groups. Clicking languages are spoken by the Hottentots and Bushmen. The second and third subfamilies are called huts and sandavas, the dialects of which are spoken by part of the population of Tanzania.
Swahili - the main African language
Kiswahili - self-name, which comes from the Arabic word sawāhil ("coast"). Language came into scientific use quite late - in the second half of the 19th century. At this time, the first descriptions of grammatical characteristics appeared. By the end of that century, Swahili dictionaries and teaching books already existed.
Today, this language is taught at most major universities in the UK, USA, Japan, Germany, France and other countries. In Tanzania, at the educational institution of Dar es Salaam, there is an institution that deals with the study of Swahili. Its activities also include the publication of a journal that contains culture, literature and other issues related to this language. Swahili received the status of the official language in Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya.
Modern writing uses the Latin alphabet, which was introduced in the 50s of the 19th century by European missionaries. In the tenth century, instead of the Latin alphabet, there was an Old Swahili letter (arabica), with the help of which the largest epic of the 18th century was written - “The Book of Heraclius”. The alphabet contains 24 letters, in which there is no X and Q , and C is used in combination ch .
House
The linguistic characteristic distinguishes three tones in the language: high, low and low. The dialect has two rows of consonants: implosive and ejective. Among the typical features of the languages of the Afrasian family, in the house there is prefixal conjugation and internal inflection.
At the time of the 19th century, Arabic dialect - ajam - was used in this dialect. Starting from the 30s of the last century, the alphabet began to be used, the basis of which is the Latin language. In Nigeria, literary standards are based on the cano dialect. As for the Republic of Niger, there is still no written language.
Hausa is the African language of interethnic communication, especially among Muslims. The total number of speakers of the dialect is more than 24 million people, making it the largest in the Chadian branch. Hausa is the dominant African language in northern Nigeria and the Republic of Niger. The difference in dialect usage in these two countries is only one letter. ƴ - this is how it is written in Niger, and such ʼy is used in Northern Nigeria.