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What do people speak in Africa?
Lagos is the capital of Nigeria, a country with over 500 native languages.
European languages are official in most African countries, due to their colonial history. When characters are shown speaking native African languages in Western media, it is almost always Swahili or a clicking language (like Xhosa). But, there are hundreds of languages that are commonly spoken in Africa to this day. Here is the breakdown of some of them:
African Language Families
The modern understanding of African languages is based on Joseph H. Greenberg s methodological classification system. This hypothesis grouped the major languages of Africa into four phyla, which were based exclusively on linguistic similarities. This system disregarded culture groups, claiming they were insignificant in the identification of language families. The four phyla identified in Greenberg s mass survey were the Afroasiatic Languages, the Niger-Congo Languages, the Nilo-Saharan Languages,