What European languages are spoken in West Africa?

What European languages are spoken in West Africa?

Since the colonial era, Indo-European languages such as Afrikaans, English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish have held official status in many countries, and are widely spoken, generally as lingua francas. (See African French and African Portuguese.)

Why are so many languages spoken in Africa?

One of the reasons for the continent’s rich linguistic diversity is simply down to time – people in Africa have had more time to develop languages than peoples elsewhere in the world. But the development of Africa’s languages is also due to cultural and political factors.

What is the most common language spoken in West Africa?

Arabic
Arabic. Arabic is the most widespread language in Africa and is the official or national language of Mauritania, Mali and Niger.

What language do people from Africa speak?

Individual languages such as Berber, Arabic, Igbo, Swahili, Hausa, Amharic, and Yoruba are spoken by tens of millions of people. About a hundred of the languages of Africa are widely used for inter-ethnic communication.

What kind of languages did the Europeans use in Africa?

The interaction of colonial languages and African speakers created new African uses of these European, or colonial, languages. Ghanaian English, for example, includes words and phrases unique to Ghana, as Ghanaians have taken English and made it their own.

How many languages are spoken in West Africa?

Africa is one of the greatest concentrations of linguistic diversity in the world. Africa’s cultural diversity cannot be overstated. There are around 2,000 languages spoken in Africa with Nigerians alone speaking over 250 languages. In West Africa, however, here are the languages with the highest number of speakers.

Which is the official language of most African countries?

Some regions had more than one European country that claimed them at various points in history. As a result, European languages, or colonial languages, became the official language (s) in most Africa countries. While this remains the case even today, most Africans speak indigenous African languages as a first language…

Which is the most prosodic language in West Africa?

So prosodic are the primarily tonal languages of West Africa, that most speech reverberates far, able to be beautifully mimicked, rhythmically reproduced, and literally “banged out” through the elaborate talking drum motifs inherent to this region of the world.