West Africa, also known as Western Africa, is the westernmost region of Africa, rich in history, culture, and linguistic diversity. This article explores the major West African languages, their historical significance, and their current status in the region.
Historical Context
Historically, West Africa was home to several powerful states and empires that controlled regional trade routes, including the Mali and Gao Empires. Positioned at a crossroads of trade between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, the region supplied goods such as gold, ivory, and advanced iron-working. During European exploration, local economies were incorporated into the Atlantic slave trade, which expanded existing systems of slavery. Even after the end of the slave trade in the early 19th century, colonial powers continued to exploit the region through colonial relationships, exporting extractive goods like cocoa, coffee, tropical timber, and mineral resources.
Migration of Saharan peoples south of the Sahelian region resulted in seasonal interaction with and gradual absorption of West African hunter-gatherers, who primarily dwelt in the savannas and forests of West Africa. The development of the region's economy allowed more centralized states and civilizations to form, beginning with Dhar Tichitt that began in 1600 B.C. followed by Djenné-Djenno beginning in 300 B.C. This was then succeeded by the Ghana Empire that first flourished roughly between the 2nd and 12th centuries C.E., which later gave way to the Mali Empire.
In the early 19th century, a series of Fulani reformist jihads swept across Western Africa. However, the French and British continued to advance in the Scramble for Africa, subjugating kingdom after kingdom. Britain controlled the Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Nigeria throughout the colonial era, while France unified Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Ivory Coast, and Niger into French West Africa. Portugal founded the colony of Guinea-Bissau, while Germany claimed Togoland, but was forced to divide it between France and Britain following First World War due to the Treaty of Versailles.
Following World War II, nationalist movements arose across West Africa.
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West Africa has made considerable linguistic progress. 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. And if it is true that “whoever acquires another language possesses another soul”, multilingual West Africans possess many. Each acquired language has its own deep history, identity, and unique grammatical particularities, from the complex pronoun systems of Yoruba and Wolof to the verb serialization of Kwa and Nupe.
In current-day Mauritania, there exist archaeological sites in the towns of Tichit and Oualata that were initially constructed around 2000 B.C., and were found to have originated from the Soninke branch of the Mandé peoples.
Three great kingdoms were identified in Bilad al-Sudan by the ninth century. The Sosso Empire sought to fill the void but was defeated (c. 1240) by the Mandinka forces of Sundiata Keita, founder of the new Mali Empire. The Mali Empire continued to flourish for several centuries, most particularly under Sundiata's grandnephew Musa I, before a succession of weak rulers led to its collapse under Mossi, Tuareg and Songhai invaders.
Meanwhile, south of Sudan, strong city-states arose in Igboland, such as the 10th-century Kingdom of Nri, which helped birth the arts and customs of the Igbo people, Bono State in the 11th century, which gave birth to the numerous Akan States, while Ife rose to prominence around the 12th century.
The Kingdom of Nri was a West African medieval state in present-day southeastern Nigeria and a subgroup of the Igbo people. The Kingdom of Nri was unusual in the history of world government in that its leader exercised no military power over his subjects. The kingdom existed as a sphere of religious and political influence over a third of Igboland and was administered by a priest-king called an Eze Nri.
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The Oyo Empire was a Yoruba empire of what is today Western, North Central Nigeria and Southern Republic of Benin. Established in the 14th century, the Oyo Empire grew to become one of the largest West African states. It rose through the outstanding organizational skills of the Yoruba, wealth gained from trade and its powerful cavalry.
The Benin Empire was a post-classical empire located in what is now southern Nigeria. Its capital was Edo, now known as Benin City, Edo. It should not be confused with the modern-day country called Benin, formerly called Dahomey. The Benin Empire was "one of the oldest and most highly developed states in the coastal hinterland of West Africa, dating perhaps to the eleventh century CE". The Benin Empire was governed by a sovereign Emperor with hundreds of thousands of soldiers and a powerful council rich in resources, wealth, ancient science and technology with cities described as beautiful and large as Haarlem. "Olfert Dapper, a Dutch writer, describing Benin in his book Description of Africa (1668) ". Its craft was the most adored and treasured bronze casting in the history of Africa.
Part of the West African regions underwent an increase in the numeracy level throughout the 19th century. The reason for such a growth was predetermined by a number of factors. Namely, the peanut production and trade, which was boosted by the demand of the colonial states. Importantly, the rise of numeracy was higher in the regions which were less hierarchical and had less dependence on the slavery trade (e.g. Sine and Salum). Whereas areas with the opposite trends illustrated opposite tendencies (e.g. central and northern Senegal).
In the United Nations scheme of African regions, the region of Western Africa includes 16 states and the United Kingdom Overseas Territory of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha:[8] Mali, Burkina Faso, Senegal and the Niger are mostly in the Sahel, a transition zone between the Sahara desert and the Sudanian Savanna; Benin, Ivory Coast, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Togo and Nigeria compose most of Guinea, the traditional name for the area near the Gulf of Guinea; Mauritania lies in the Maghreb, the northwestern region of Africa that has historically been inhabited by West African groups such as the Fulani, Soninke, Wolof, Serer and Toucouleur people,[48] along with Arab-Berber Maghrebi people such as the Tuareg; Cape Verde is an island country in the Atlantic Ocean; and Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha consists of eight main islands located in four different parts of the Atlantic.
Linguistic Diversity in West Africa
West Africa is a region of immense linguistic diversity. The number of languages natively spoken in Africa is variously estimated at between 1,250 and 2,100, and by some counts at over 3,000. Nigeria alone has over 500 languages, one of the greatest concentrations of linguistic diversity in the world. There are several other small families and language isolates, as well as creoles and languages that have yet to be classified. Around a hundred languages are widely used for interethnic communication.
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Approximately 1,500-2,000 different languages are spoken in Africa, including hundreds of ancient African languages and African tribal languages.
Most languages natively spoken in Africa belong to one of the two large language families that dominate the continent: Afroasiatic, or Niger-Congo. Another hundred belong to smaller families such as Ubangian, Nilotic, Saharan, and the various families previously grouped under the umbrella term Khoisan. The earliest Afroasiatic languages are associated with the Capsian culture, the Saharan languages are linked with the Khartoum Mesolithic/Neolithic cultures.
Major Language Families
- Afroasiatic: Spoken throughout North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Western Asia and parts of the Sahel. There are approximately 375 Afroasiatic languages spoken by over 400 million people. The main subfamilies of Afroasiatic are Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Omotic, Egyptian and Semitic. Some of the most widely spoken Afroasiatic languages include Arabic (a Semitic language, and a recent arrival from West Asia), Somali (Cushitic), Berber (Berber), Hausa (Chadic), Amharic (Semitic) and Oromo (Cushitic).
- Nilo-Saharan: A proposed grouping of some one hundred diverse languages. This hypothetical family would reach an expanse that stretches from the Nile Valley to northern Tanzania and into Nigeria and DR Congo, with the Songhay languages along the middle reaches of the Niger River as a geographic outlier. Some of the better known Nilo-Saharan languages are Kanuri, Fur, Songhay, Nobiin and the widespread Nilotic family, which includes the Luo, Dinka and Maasai.
- Niger-Congo: Constitutes the largest language family spoken in West Africa and perhaps the world in terms of the number of languages. One of its salient features is an elaborate noun class system with grammatical concord. A large majority of languages of this family are tonal such as Yoruba and Igbo, Akan and Ewe language. The Niger-Kordofanian language family, joining Niger-Congo with the Kordofanian languages of south-central Sudan, was proposed in the 1950s by Joseph Greenberg.
- Khoisan: The three small Khoisan families of southern Africa have not been shown to be closely related to any other major language family. In addition, there are various other families that have not been demonstrated to belong to one of these families. Khoisan is a term of convenience covering some 30 languages spoken by around 300,000-400,000 people. There are five Khoisan families that have not been shown to be related to each other: Khoe, Tuu and Kx'a, which are found mainly in Namibia and Botswana, as well as Sandawe and Hadza of Tanzania, which are language isolates. A striking feature of Khoisan languages, and the reason they are often grouped together, is their use of click consonants. Some neighbouring Bantu languages (notably Xhosa and Zulu) have clicks as well, but these were adopted from Khoisan languages.
Languages from families outside of the African continent are also spoken there. Many African creoles also use Indo-European lexifiers.
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.
Throughout the long multilingual history of the African continent, African languages have been subject to phenomena like language contact, language expansion, language shift and language death. A case in point is the Bantu expansion, in which Bantu-speaking peoples expanded over most of Sub-Equatorial Africa, intermingling with Khoi-San speaking peoples from much of Southeast Africa and Southern Africa and other peoples from Central Africa.
After gaining independence, many African countries, in the search for national unity, selected one language, generally the former Indo-European colonial language, to be used in government and education. However, in recent years, African countries have become increasingly supportive of maintaining linguistic diversity.
Of the 1 billion Africans (in 2009), about 17 percent speak an Arabic dialect. About 10 percent speak Swahili, the lingua franca of Southeast Africa; about 5 percent speak a Berber dialect; and about 5 percent speak Hausa, which serves as a lingua franca in much of the Sahel. Other large West African languages are Yoruba, Igbo, Akan and Fula. Major Horn of Africa languages are Somali, Amharic and Oromo. Lingala is important in Central Africa. French, English, and Portuguese are important languages in Africa due to colonialism. About 320 million, 240 million and 35 million Africans, respectively, speak them as either native or secondary languages.
| Language | Total Speakers | Region | Example Phrase |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arabic | 150 million | North Africa | "As-salamu alaykum" (Peace be upon you) |
| French | 120 million | West Africa, Central Africa, North Africa | "Bonjour" (Hello) |
| Swahili | 80 million | East Africa | "Hakuna Matata" (No worries) |
| Hausa | 70 million | West Africa | "Sannu" (Hello) |
| Amharic | 57 million | Ethiopia | "Selam" (Peace/Hello) |
| Yoruba | 45 million | Nigeria, Benin, Togo | "Bawo ni" (How are you?) |
| Oromo | 40 million | Ethiopia, Kenya | "Akkam" (How are you?) |
| Igbo | 40 million | Nigeria | "Kedu" (How are you?) |
| Portuguese | 30 million | Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau | "Olá" (Hello) |
| Zulu | 27 million | South Africa | "Sawubona" (Hello) |
| Malagasy | 25 million | Madagascar | "Salama" (Hello) |
| Fulani (Fula) | 25 million | West Africa | "Jam naa" (How are you?) |
| Somali | 22 million | Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia | "Salaan" (Hello) |
| Shona | 14 million | Zimbabwe | "Mhoro" (Hello) |
| Rundi (Kirundi) | 13 million | Burundi | "Bwakeye" (Good morning) |
| Kinyarwanda | 12 million | Rwanda | "Muraho" (Hello) |
| Chichewa | 12 million | Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique | "Moni" (Hello) |
| Akan | 12 million | Ghana, Ivory Coast | "Ete sen" (How are you?) |
| Tigrinya | 9 million | Eritrea, Ethiopia | "Selam" (Hello) |
Some linguistic features are particularly common among languages spoken in Africa, whereas others are less common. Such shared traits probably are not due to a common origin of all African languages. certain types of consonants, such as implosives (/ɓa/), ejectives (/kʼa/), the labiodental flap and in southern Africa, clicks (/ǂa/, /ᵑǃa/). nasal stops which only occur with nasal vowels, such as [ba] vs. Tonal languages are found throughout the world but are especially common in Africa - in fact, there are far more tonal than non-tonal languages in Africa.
Both the Nilo-Saharan and the Khoi-San phyla are fully tonal. The large majority of the Niger-Congo languages are also tonal. Tonal languages are also found in the Omotic, Chadic and South & East Cushitic branches of Afroasiatic. The most common type of tonal system opposes two tone levels, High (H) and Low (L). Contour tones do occur, and can often be analysed as two or more tones in succession on a single syllable.
Tone melodies play an important role, meaning that it is often possible to state significant generalizations by separating tone sequences ("melodies") from the segments that bear them. Widespread syntactical structures include the common use of adjectival verbs and the expression of comparison by means of a verb 'to surpass'. The Niger-Congo languages have large numbers of genders (noun classes) which cause agreement in verbs and other words. Case, tense and other categories may be distinguished only by tone.
One of the most widely spoken Sub-Saharan African languages on the eastern side of the continent is Somali. Zulu is spoken natively by around 12 million Africans, as well as being used as a second language by some 16 million people. It is one of 11 official languages in South Africa, where it is spoken by around 23% of the population.
Sadly, as we’re witnessing around the world, languages are dropping out of use, moving from being endangered to becoming extinct. More than 300 African languages are endangered at present and over 50 languages are entirely extinct.
There are plenty of reasons to learn one or more of the different African languages. Anyone wishing to travel across Africa would also do well to learn the basics or one or more of the most common languages in Africa, in order to help facilitate their travels. Of course, it’s also a wonderful experience to learn a language - whether an African language or another - for the sheer joy of it. And as with learning any language, there are plenty of associated insights to be gleaned.
Here is a map showing the language families of Africa:
Map of language families in Africa.
Language Endangerment
Language endangerment is a significant concern in Africa. The major threat to linguistic diversity here is the spread of the Bantu language family. One endangered language in this area is Yangkam, spoken by fewer than 100 people, all of whom are 50 years old or older. Most of the Yangkam have shifted to speaking Hausa, one of the major national languages of Nigeria. They have maintained other elements of their cultural identity, but do not consider their language an important part of the culture.
A complete African languages list might be a little ambitious, given there are up to 2,000 languages to include and that some haven’t even been classified.
The less common African languages vary hugely in terms of speaker numbers. Some have hundreds of thousands of speakers, while others have very few native speakers of the language and are teetering on the brink of extinction. The Oxford Press has published that there are about 308 critically endangered languages.
Some steps have already been taken in the form of WARFP (the World Bank's West Africa Regional Fisheries Program which empowers west-African countries (i.e. Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cape Verde, and Senegal) with information, training and monitoring systems. Furthermore, Liberia enacted a fisheries regulations Act in 2010[71] and installed a satellite-based monitoring system and Senegal enacted a fisheries code in 2015. In Cape Verde, the fishermen communities of Palmiera and Santa Maria have organized themselves to protect fishing zones.
Visual Communication
Drawn in the red Sahelian dust, the thousand or so encoded Nsibidi symbols communicate thought instantaneously. Today, those same visual symbols have inspired many contemporary forms of cultural expression. One creative example includes Custom PVC Keychains that feature adinkra or nsibidi motifs.
