II.

Classifying African Languages

American linguist Joseph H. Greenberg provided the first comprehensive classification of African languages. In The Languages of Africa (1963) he traced the historical origin and development of African languages, and classified them into four major groups: Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan. Today, the largest language group in number of speakers, Niger-Congo, has from 300 million to 400 million speakers. The second largest group, Afro-Asiatic, has from 200 million to 300 million, followed by Nilo-Saharan with nearly 30 million and Khoisan with about 200,000 to 300,000. These figures represent rough estimates, however; accurate figures are unavailable, and many Africans speak more than one language.

In classifying African languages, Greenberg compared lists of basic words from a large number of languages. He also compared similarities in the forms and functions of grammatical structures. Languages belonging to the same group share certain basic vocabulary—words known as cognates—and grammatical features that trace back to a common origin. Linguists refer to this shared origin as the protolanguage or the ancestral language.

Dialects form when groups of people who speak the same language move apart, and their languages change in different ways. At first, each group can understand the variants spoken by the other groups, but after hundreds of years of separation the variants may become mutually unintelligible. By that time, distinct languages have formed with cognates and similar grammatical systems. Swahili, for example, belongs to the Bantu language group. All Bantu languages trace their roots to Cameroon and western Nigeria, where linguists believe the ancestral language originated.

Linguists describe most African languages as tonal, because the pitch at which a syllable or group of syllables is pronounced can indicate meaning. Some African languages have a noun class system in which speakers attach prefixes and suffixes to noun stems to indicate singular or plural or to express qualities of the noun, such as size or animacy (whether the entity referred to is animate or inanimate). Other African languages distinguish between masculine and feminine nouns, or between masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns.