It is a well-known fact that Africa is a huge continent, in fact the second largest, with a very large population. Spread over a land area of 30.3 million square kilometres, it is reportedly home to around 2,000 languages and has a population of 1.216 billion people belonging to different native tribes and groups.
It is believed that over 3,000 languages are spoken in Africa – from rare and exotic tongues to some of the world’s most common languages.
Of the top 10 languages spoken in Africa, two are European. It may come as a surprise to many that the English language is nowhere on the list.
The most common language in the continent is Arabic with over 300 million people using this language in Africa.
Arabic is a Semitic language and is an official language in Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, Libya and Eritrea. It’s also widely spoken in many other countries.
The next in line is French with 120 million people in Africa speaking the European language.
French can get you pretty far in many African countries, especially in North, West and Central Africa, where a number of countries were French colonies in the past.
African French has unique features that take some getting used to. Its accents and vocabulary are heavily influenced by surrounding native African languages, and the resulting dialects are rather distinct.
Hausa, one of Nigeria’s official languages, and a member of the Chadic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages is spoken by more than 50 million Africans as their first language.
Other than Nigeria, Hausa is spoken in Niger, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Togo, Ghana, and Chad.
Hausa makes to the list of most spoken languages in Africa due to its significance in trade, commerce, and business across Nigeria and the West African region.
Besides that, it is one of the few African languages that is taught in International Universities due to the huge amount of literature that it possesses.
