Which African language is best to learn?

What is the most useful African language to learn?

Swahili. Swahili is the language most linguists will think of when talking about lingua francas in Africa. It's co-official with English in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda, and spoken by anywhere from 50 to 150 million people – the overwhelming majority as a second language.

What African language should I learn first?

Swahili is said to be the easiest African language for an English speaker to learn. It is heavily influenced by Arabic and Indo-European languages such as Portuguese, German, English, and French. It's one of the few sub-Saharan African languages that have no lexical tone, just as in English.

Which African languages should I learn?

Arguably, the most useful, indigenous African languages for Americans to learn are Yoruba (primarily spoken in Nigeria), Xhosa (South Africa), Swahili (Kenya, Tanzania, and much of East Africa), and Amharic (mainly Ethiopia).

What is the most beautiful African language?

Lingala. When it comes to the most beautiful and most melodic languages, those in the know about the many wonderful languages of Africa will often point to Lingala.

Top 4 Easy To Learn African Languages

What is the hardest African language?

Xhosa is one of the most difficult languages to learn because of its complex structure. It is spoken by 8 million people in South Africa and by 11 million people throughout Africa. Most of its speakers live in the Eastern Cape, Western Cape, Gauteng, and Northern Cape.

What is the easiest African language?

Swahili is said to be the easiest African language for an English speaker to learn. It's one of the few sub-Saharan African languages that have no lexical tone, just like in English. It's also much easier to read as you read out Swahili words just the way they are written.

What are the top 3 African languages?

The most widely spoken languages of Africa, Swahili (200 million), Yoruba (45 million), Igbo (30 million), and Fula (35 million) all belong to the Niger-Congo family.

What is the 1 language in Africa?

1. SWAHILI. The most spoken language in Africa is Swahili which is said to have between 100 and 150 million speakers. Known as a 'Bantu' language, Swahili apparently originated from other languages like Arabic.

Is there a universal African language?

With more than 200 million speakers, Swahili, which originated in East Africa, is one of the world's 10 most widely spoken languages and, as Priya Sippy writes, there is a renewed push for it to become the continent's lingua franca.

What are the 5 main languages in Africa?

Which African speaks fluent English?

South Africa unquestionably tops the list of English-speaking countries in Africa, based on the 2021 EF English Proficiency Index (EF EPI) from Education First. English is one of 11 official languages of the country, and about 28 percent of residents speak English as a first language.

Is Swahili taught in America?

The language is also taught in elementary, middle and high schools in the US—most of them chartered schools—to mostly African American children. Approximately 90,000 people speak Swahili in the United States, according to Piedmont Global Language Solutions, a US-based language services provider.

What are the top 3 languages to learn?

Is Zulu easier than Afrikaans?

Afrikaans is a much easier language to master. There are no clicks, the vocabulary and the structures are part of the same family of languages as English and therefore easier to pick up… [It] has none of the archaic, historical structures of older languages like English, German, Latin, Zulu etcetera.”

Is it difficult to learn Zulu?

This language has a class two rating on the difficulty scale for English-speaking learners, which means if you start now, you'll be speaking Zulu in under forty-four weeks!

What language did slaves from Africa?

In the English colonies Africans spoke an English-based Atlantic Creole, generally called plantation creole. Low Country Africans spoke an English-based creole that came to be called Gullah. Gullah is a language closely related to Krio a creole spoken in Sierra Leone.

What language do Nigerians speak?

The official language is English, but it is spoken less frequently in rural areas and amongst people with lower education levels. Other major languages spoken include: Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Fulfulde, Ibibio, Kanuri, and Tiv. Nigerian Sign Language, Hausa Sign Language, and Bura Sign Language are all used in Nigeria.

What is the 3 oldest language?

Greek is the third oldest language in the world. Latin was the official language of the ancient Roman Empire and ancient Roman religion. It is currently the official language of the Roman Catholic Church and the official language of the Vatican City. Like Sanskrit, it is a classical language.

What is the easiest language to learn?

How many African languages are black?

List of official, national and spoken languages of Africa. Africa is a continent with a very high linguistic diversity, there are an estimated 1500-2000 African languages. gathering appoximately 140 languages with some eleven millions speakers scattered in Central and Eastern Africa.

What is the 2 most spoken language in Africa?

2nd place: Arabic

More than 100 million Africans speak Arabic, illustrating the external influences that have shaped life on the continent for many centuries. In Ethiopia, Niger, Senegal, and also in Tanzania, Arabic is spoken mainly on official occasions.

Is it difficult to learn Yoruba?

The Yoruba language is probably the most scholastically studied indigenous West African language, which makes it one of the easiest African languages to learn.