Africa's 10 Most Spoken Languages

Africa is the future! Mark my words. As someone that owns a translation agency I have been keeping my eye on the continent and can see the progress as well as what's to come. So with the future looking bright, it's obvious business will boom and as a result the demand for language services will hopefully also boooooom! So I thought it would be useful to check out African's top ten spoken languages.

Arabic

Spoken by 150m Africans but there are so many dialects that someone using Moroccan Arabic would make as much sense to an Arabic speaker from Egypt as a sign language interpreter at a memorial service for Nelson Mandela.

Swahili

Spoken by 100m Africans. This is a Bantu language and the mother tongue of the Swahili people. It is spoken by many communities inhabiting the African Great Lakes region and other parts of Southeast Africa including Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwandi and Mozambique.

Hausa

Spoken by 70m Africans mostly in Niger and in the north of Nigeria. It's used as a trade language across a wide part of West Africa, Central Africa and Northwestern Sudan. Hausa is one of three indigenous languages of Nigeria that has been rendered in Braille.

English

Spoken by 60m Africans and is the third most common native language in the world. Nigeria and South Africa are the two African countries with the most native English speakers. Many Africans will speak Creole or pidgin versions of these European languages and they may not be so easy to understand when you first hear them.

Amharic

Spoken by 50m Africans, this is a Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia where it is the official working language. Many Rastafarians learn this as a second language.

French

Spoken by 50m Africans mainly those who reside in Francophone Africa. French is most commonly spoken in Gabon, Mauritius, Algeria, Senegal and Cote d'Ivoire. It is mostly a second language in Africa.

Oromo

Spoken by 30m Africans, this is an Afro-Asiatic language and forms of the language are spoken as a first language by the Oromo and neighbouring peoples in Ethiopia and parts of Northern Kenya.

Yoruba

Spoken by 30m Africans, this is a Niger-Congo language spoken in West Africa in Nigeria, Benin and Togo and other parts of Africa.

Igbo

spoken by 25m Africans, this is the principal native language of the Igbo people, an ethnic group of South Eastern Nigeria. Igbo is written in the Latin script which was introduced by British colonialists. There are over 20 Igbo dialects; it is a tonal language with two distinctive tones, high and low.

Zulu

Spoken by 20m Africans, this is the language of the Zulu people with the vast majority living in South Africa. It became one of South Africa's eleven official languages in 1994. The first grammar book of the Zulu language was published in Norway in 1850.