Africa on the Ground

Myths

Do Africans speak "African"?

There is no language called African. Glottolog lists more than 2,000 of them, in 43 families.

1 minute read · every sentence below carries its source number

In the record

The idea

Some people say a person speaks "African", as if the continent had one language. It has more than two thousand.

What the count says

Glottolog, a reference database of the world's languages, lists 2,373 languages with Africa as their only macroarea.[1] Leaving out its placeholder entries and the sign languages it files apart, 2,264 remain; some of them are no longer spoken.[1] Both counts come from the database's data file, as read for this site.[1]

Those 2,264 belong to 43 families, and another 15 are isolates with no known relatives.[1] The largest family, Atlantic-Congo, holds 1,407 of them, about 62%. Afro-Asiatic, which includes Hausa and Amharic, holds 313.[1] The percentage is calculated here.[1]

In one country

The World Factbook's entry for Nigeria lists English (official), Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo and Fulani, and then adds "over 500 additional indigenous languages".[2]

What "official" means

English is marked official in 22 of the 54 countries, French in 20, Arabic in 12 and Portuguese in 6, according to the Factbook's wording.[2] Those counts are made on the Society page of this site, and leave out languages the Factbook marks only as regional or working languages.[2]

An official language is the one the state uses for law and schools. It is not necessarily the one people speak at home.

What we do not know
  • Glottolog's boundary between a language and a dialect is a scholarly choice, and other databases give different totals. Some of the 2,264 are extinct or nearly so.
  • The count uses entries with Africa as their only macroarea; languages shared with another macroarea, such as Arabic, are not in it.
  • The Factbook writes languages differently from country to country: some entries list a dozen, others name none. Official-language counts use its wording and our reading of it.
From people who know this

What readers add

No local voice on this story yet.Notes are added once the author has agreed to publication, and are read by people who know the subject afterwards.

Sources

  1. Academic[1] Harald Hammarström, Robert Forkel, Martin Haspelmath and Sebastian Bank, Glottolog. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. glottolog.org retrieved 7 Oct 2026
    Family and code for each language on the Languages page. Read from the CLDF export of the database (github.com/glottolog/glottolog-cldf, licence CC BY 4.0); the repository's README says version 5.3, its metadata file says 5.2.1. Glottolog gives only the top-level family here; the finer branches are not shown.
  2. Institutional · to verify[2] The World Factbook: Government type, Languages, Religions (africa/*.json). CIA, via the factbook/factbook.json copy on GitHub. github.com retrieved 7 Oct 2026
    Public-domain text copied unchanged. The copy does not say which edition it holds, and each figure carries its own estimate year in the text. Shares are estimates from censuses or surveys of different years; official languages are as the Factbook records them.

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