Uses more than eight hundred languages ​​in everyday conversation, which are very different from each other and at the same time have a lot in common. The dialects of the hottest continent in the world are grouped into 4 families: Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo (formerly Western Sudanese), Nilo-Saharan and Bushman. One of the main African languages ​​is called Swahili. This dialect is spoken by 150 million people.

Afroasian family

Phonetics is characterized by the absence of tones that are present in other widely spoken dialects. It is also necessary to note the frequent laryngeal and pharyngeal consonants and consonantal groups rarely used in other languages.

As for grammatical features, the words and sentences of this group are characterized by categories of gender in the pronoun, correlated with sexual characteristics; various ways of plural formation for names (reduplication, suffixation and sounds inside words) and arbitrary verb forms (passive, causative, reflexive and others). Each African language that is part of the Semitic branch of the Afroasian family is distinguished by the presence of triconsonant roots.

The dialects of this group are widespread among the peoples. They also dominate in the east of the continent, namely in Ethiopia, mainland Tanzania, in Somalia and the Middle East. The Afroasian family includes five branches: Ancient Egyptian, Cushite, Semitic, Berber and Chadic. The latter includes one of the main African languages ​​- Hausa.

Nilo-Saharan family

The dialects of this group are tonal without nominal classes, although some of them have two grammatical genders. The African language of the Nilo-Saharan family includes verbs that have a set of arbitrary forms. Sometimes the name uses its own case system.

Important subdivisions of this group are the Shari-Nile and Sahara subfamilies. The latter includes such dialects as Kanuri (used in the native kingdom of Bornu), as well as Daza and Teda, which are spoken by the population of the eastern regions of the Sahara.

Niger-Congo family

A distinctive feature of the grammatical structure of the dialects of this group are nominal classes, expressed by different affixes for the plural and singular. The African language, belonging to the Niger-Congo family, has pronouns and adjectives that agree with nouns in the class to which they are assigned. Also, the dialects of this group, unlike European ones, instead of three genders (female, male and middle) have a huge number of nominal classes. Thus, animals belong to one class, people to another, and, for example, trees to a third. At the same time, there are some groups that do not have a basis for semantic classification.

Roughly, the Niger-Congo family is divided into 8 subfamilies. These are the Atlantic, Mandingo, Kwa, Ijo, Voltai, Oriental, Adamawa and Benue Congo. The last branch includes the most used and well-known African language - Swahili.

Clicking tongues

This name (formerly Bushman) got its name due to the peculiar clicking notes that are used as consonants and are used exclusively in Africa. The articulatory interpretation of these sounds is ambiguous: now they are called non-respiratory, since they are produced practically without the use of the lungs, with the help of sucking movements. That is, they are opposed to implosive and explosive consonants.

The first of the three groups into which the Bushmen family is divided is called the Khoisan. Its languages ​​are widely spoken in South Africa. In turn, the Khoisan subfamily is subdivided into northern, southern and central groups. Clicking languages ​​are spoken by the Hottentots and the Bushmen. The second and third subfamilies are called Hatsa and Sandawe, which are spoken by part of the population of Tanzania.

Swahili is the main African language

Kiswahili is a self-name that comes from the Arabic word sawahil("coast"). The language came into scientific use quite late - in the second half of the 19th century. At this time, the first descriptions of grammatical characteristics appeared. By the end of the same century, Swahili dictionaries and educational books already existed.

Today this language is taught in most major universities in the UK, USA, Japan, Germany, France and other countries. In Tanzania, at the educational institution of Dar es Salaam, there is an institute that studies Swahili. His activities also include the publication of a magazine that contains culture, literature and other issues related to this language. Swahili has received the status of the state language in Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya.

Modern writing uses the Latin alphabet, which was introduced in the 50s of the 19th century by European missionaries. In the tenth century, instead, there was an old Swahili script (Arabic), with the help of which the largest epic of the 18th century, the Book of Heraclius, was written. The alphabet contains 24 letters, in which there is no X And Q, but C used in combination ch.

Hausa

The linguistic characteristic distinguishes three tones in the language: high, falling and low. The dialect has two rows of consonants: implosive and ejective. Among the typical features of the languages ​​of the Afro-Asiatic family, Hausa has prefix conjugation and internal inflection.

During the 19th century, this dialect used the Arabic script - ajam. Starting from the 30s of the last century, an alphabet began to be used, the basis of which is the Latin language. In Nigeria, literary speech standards are based on the Kano dialect. As for it, there is still no written language.

Hausa is an African lingua franca, especially among Muslims. With a total of over 24 million native speakers, the dialect has become the largest of the Chadian branch. The African language Hausa is the dominant language in Northern Nigeria and the Republic of Niger. The difference in the use of the dialect in these two countries is only one letter. ƴ - so it is written in Niger, and such ʼy used in Northern Nigeria.

The content of the article

AFRICAN LANGUAGES. Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, speaks a great variety of languages. An exact figure cannot be given, since there is no generally accepted method for distinguishing between languages ​​and dialects. However, by any reasonable estimate, there are over 800 different languages ​​in Africa. Estimates of the number of speakers for most African languages ​​vary greatly, due to the use of different methods of counting, the widespread use of many of the largest languages ​​as languages ​​of interethnic communication, as well as the exceptionally high dynamics of demographic processes (rapid population growth in some countries, such as Nigeria, and intensive migration to cities), leading to the rapid obsolescence of statistical data. Some local languages, such as Swahili in East Africa and Hausa in West Africa, were widely used as a lingua franca, i.e. as intermediary languages ​​in the communication of multilingual groups, even before the introduction of European languages, now Zulu, Lingala and some others have been added to their number.

With all their diversity, African languages ​​can be grouped into four large families of different origins: Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo (formerly known as Western Sudanese and also includes Bantu languages), Nilo-Saharan (Sudanese) and the family of click languages ​​(formerly called Bushman and also including Hottentot and two East African languages).

Although the thesis of the origin of these four families from one source cannot be proved, there are a number of linguistic features common to a large number of African languages ​​and rare or absent outside of Africa, which allows us to consider this continent an independent language area. These features include tones discussed below, nominal classification systems, and verbal derivation. Vocalism is generally simple, with no umlaut or other sound modifications, except for a very common nasalization. Syllables are usually open, i.e. ending only in vowels (except in most Afroasian languages). Typical initial combinations "nasal consonant + voiced stop", such as mb- and nd-. Common in African languages ​​and rarely found outside of Africa are clicking consonants, labiovelar consonants, which are characterized by a double - labial and back-lingual - closure (kp and gb), and implosive occlusions, accompanied not by the expulsion of the air jet from the oral cavity, but by its retraction. Tonal systems usually include two or three significant registers (pitches), unlike languages ​​such as Chinese, which use contour tones (rising, descending, etc.). Many characteristic semantic idioms are common throughout Africa, for example, the phrase literally meaning "mouth of the house" is used to refer to a door, literally "children of the hand" to refer to fingers, the word meaning "child" is used as a diminutive (diminutive indicator).

Any significant information about African languages, especially widespread in South Africa, became available only in the 19th century, when Europeans penetrated deep into the continent. This led to attempts at a general classification of African languages ​​(R. Lepsius, F. Muller, R. Kast). In the first two decades of the 20th century, mainly due to the efforts of K. Meinhof and D. Westerman (the first one is a specialist in Bantu, the second one is a specialist in Sudanese languages), a widely used classification was developed, according to which all African languages ​​were divided into five families: Semitic , Hamitic, Sudanese, Bantu and Bushmen. Approximately in this order, these families were distributed over the territory of the African continent in the direction from north to south. Initially, it was believed that the languages ​​of the first two families were spoken by representatives of the white race (Caucasians), the next two by the black race (Negroids), and the languages ​​of the last family were spoken by representatives of the Bushman race. The main disadvantages of this classification were as follows. 1) As Westerman himself has shown, the Bantu languages ​​are combined with a large group of languages ​​of Western Sudan into a single family, in general, not related to the languages ​​of Eastern Sudan. 2) The Semitic group is not independent, it is related to the "Hamitic" languages. In addition, as M. Cohen and others pointed out, “Hamitic” languages ​​are not at all a separate taxonomic unit within some larger one, but just a traditional designation of all non-Semitic groups. 3) With regard to the various proposals by Meinhof to attribute the status of "Hamitic" to a number of languages ​​(eg Fula, Maasai, Hottentot), almost all of them are now recognized as incorrect. Only the Hausa language, which together with many of the languages ​​of Chad forms the Chadic group, can be considered "Hamitic" and therefore belongs to the Afroasian family (formerly called Semitic-Hamitic or Hamito-Semitic). This article presents the classification of African languages ​​that arose as a result of these major modifications.

African family.

In phonetics, the Afroasian languages ​​are characterized by the absence of tones so common in other African languages. An exception is the Chadic languages, which seem to have acquired tones under the influence of the neighboring Niger-Congo and Sudanese languages. We can also note the frequent occurrence of pharyngeal and laryngeal consonants and complex consonantal groups, which are rare in other African languages. The most characteristic grammatical features: the category of gender (correlated with gender) in the pronoun, name and verb, including in the 2nd person; a variety of models for the formation of the plural of a name (including partial reduplication, alternation of vowels within a word, suffixation); a complex set of derived verb forms (passive, reflexive, causative, etc.). The predominance of triconsonant roots seems to be a purely Semitic language development.

Afroasian languages ​​almost completely dominate North Africa, are widely spoken in East Africa (Ethiopia, Somalia, mainland Tanzania) and the Middle East. There are 5 branches: Ancient Egyptian, Semitic, Berber, Cushitic and Chadic.

Ancient Egyptian branch.

The ancient Egyptian language, in later stages of development, after the transition to an alphabetic script, known as Coptic, is now extinct, superseded by Arabic. However, the Monophysite Christian Church of Egypt still uses it for worship.

Semitic branch.

It is divided into subgroups: Akkadian (now extinct), Canaanite (Hebrew and Phoenician languages, including the Punic language that existed in ancient times in northern Africa), Aramaic, North Arabian (classical Arabic) and South Arabian-Ethiosemitic. Classical Arabic, during the Muslim conquests of the early Middle Ages, spread throughout North Africa and across the Nile Valley into the Sudan. Today it exists in the form of various local dialects. Arabic is the native language of some Negroid groups (such as the Shuwa of the Lake Chad region) and is used as the lingua franca by the Negroid peoples of the Wadai and Darfur regions east of Lake Chad.

The rest of the Semitic languages ​​of Africa belong to the Ethio-Semitic subgroup and are related to the South Arabian languages ​​of the Sabaean and Minean inscriptions. They entered Africa long before the Christian era, in the course of an elusive tribal migration from the south of the Arabian Peninsula. The Ethio-Semitic languages ​​are divided into 2 subgroups: northern (Tigre, Tigrinya and the now extinct Geez, or classical Ethiopian language) and southern (Gurage dialects; Harari, the local language of the city of Harar; and finally, Amharic - the most important of the Ethio-Semitic languages, the state language of Ethiopia) .

Berber branch.

The Berber languages, long considered dialects of a single language and formerly distributed throughout North Africa (except Egypt) and the Canary Islands, are now preserved mainly in the western part of this region and among the nomadic tribes of the Tuareg of the Sahara. Ancient Berber inscriptions have been found in an alphabet, apparently of Carthaginian origin, which is still used by the Tuareg.

Kushite branch.

The Cushitic languages ​​spoken in East Africa are divided into 5 subgroups: northern, consisting of the Beja language; eastern, among the most important representatives of which are the Somali, Oromo (Galla), Saho-Afar and Sidamo languages; the central one, consisting of the languages ​​of the Agau peoples, which have undergone strong Ethio-Semitic influence linguistically and culturally; the western one, which includes the Kaffa language and many other minor languages ​​of southwestern Ethiopia and adjacent areas; and a small southern one, consisting of several less widely spoken languages, such as Irakw in mainland Tanzania.

Chadian branch.

Numerous Chadian languages ​​are spoken mainly in northern Nigeria, in Niger and east of it in Cameroon and the Republic of Chad. In terms of the number of speakers, the largest among them is the Hausa language, which is spoken by several tens of millions of people. Hausa is the dominant language of Northern Nigeria and also the most commonly used lingua franca of West Africa. Hausa has literature based on a simplified version of the Arabic alphabet. Chadic also includes Boleva, Angas, Ankwe, Tangale, Bura, Margi, Higi, Mandara, Musgu, Mubi, Sokoro, and Kotoko-Buduma.

Niger-Congo family.

The Niger-Congo languages, the largest sub-African language group, are predominantly tonal. A distinctive feature of the grammatical structure is a set of nominal classes expressed using affixes that are different for singular and plural. In many Niger-Congo languages, adjectives and pronouns agree in class with the noun they refer to. However, unlike European languages ​​(where a maximum of three genders are distinguished - masculine, feminine and neuter), the number of nominal classes is very large and gender is not the basis for their distinction. Thus, humans belong to one class, animals to another, trees (together with other hard-to-classify objects) to a third, and some classes have no discernible basis for semantic classification at all.

The Niger-Congo languages ​​can be roughly divided into eight subfamilies (in a west-east direction): Atlantic, Mandingo (or Mande), Woltaic (aka Gur), Kwa, Benue-Congo (including the Bantu languages), Ijo, Adamaua, and Eastern ( ubangian).

Atlantic subfamily.

Consists of languages ​​spoken primarily in Senegal, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone. Among them are Wolof - the local language of Dakar and a number of regions of Senegal, the Temne language (Sierra Leone) and the Fula language, which is spoken by several million people who migrated east as far as the Vadai region across Lake Chad.

Mandingo subfamily.

These languages ​​are spoken immediately to the east of the bulk of the Atlantic languages, mainly in Sierra Leone, Liberia and the upper Niger River. The most important languages ​​are Mande (Liberia), Malinke, Bambara and Diola (Mali). Diola is widely spoken as a trade lingua franca. Smaller Mandingo languages ​​are scattered as far northeast as Nigeria.

Voltai (or gur) subfamily.

The languages ​​of this subfamily are dominant in Burkina Faso and northern Ghana. Among them are the sea (the language of the native kingdom of Mossi), Dagomba and Dogon. The Senufo languages ​​spoken to the west also appear to be a subgroup of the Voltaic languages.

Qua subfamily.

Its distribution area is strongly elongated from west to east, and in the south it is limited by the Gulf of Guinea. The inclusion of the Kru languages ​​in the extreme west of its range, in Liberia, into this subfamily is highly doubtful. Among the most important languages ​​of the Kwa subfamily are the subgroup of the Akan languages ​​(Ivory Coast and Ghana); Fon, the language of the native kingdom of Benin; and the Gan language, spoken in Accra, the capital of Ghana. The two main languages ​​\u200b\u200bof Southern Nigeria, also belong to the Kwa subfamily, Yoruba and Ibo, as well as the Nupe and Bini languages ​​(the latter is spoken in the city of Benin, the center of fine arts).

Benue-Congo subfamily.

It includes as a separate division a large group of Bantu languages, which almost or completely replaced other languages ​​in most of the Congo (Zaire) basin, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi, and also, along with clicking languages, are common in South Africa and her former possessions.

Of the Bantu languages, Swahili is the most widely spoken, with many millions of speakers and used as the lingua franca almost everywhere in East Africa and even in eastern Zaire, where it is known as Qingwana. Swahili has a very extensive traditional literature based on a simplified version of the Arabic alphabet. Other major Bantu languages ​​are Zulu, Xhosa, Pedi, Sotho, and Chwana or Tswana in South Africa; Macua, Tonga and Shitswa in Mozambique; Nyanja in Malawi; Shona and Bemba in Zimbabwe and Zambia; the Kikuyu in Kenya; luganda, the main language of Uganda; Nyarwanda and Rundi in Rwanda and Burundi; umbundu and kimbundu in Angola; and the four main languages ​​of Zaire - Luba, Kikongo, Lingala and Mongo Nkundu. Other non-Bantu languages ​​of the Benue-Niger subfamily, often referred to as Semi-Bantu, are spoken in central and eastern Nigeria and Cameroon. Of these, we mention the Tiv, Jukin, and Efik languages.

Ijo language

(the central part of the southern coast of Nigeria), in all likelihood, forms a separate subgroup within the Niger-Congo family.

Adamawa subfamily

consists of several relatively obscure languages ​​spoken in the east of Central Nigeria and the surrounding areas of Cameroon.

Eastern (Ubangi) subfamily.

The eastern (Ubangi) subfamily is distributed in the watershed of the Niger and Congo rivers north of the Bantu range, reaching Sudan in the east. The most important languages ​​are Zande, Banda and Sango; the latter is the common lingua franca.

Niger-Congo languages ​​appear to be related Kordofanian languages, which is a much smaller group, common in the mountains of Nubia (Kordofan province of the Republic of Sudan).

Nilo-Saharan (Sudanese) family.

The languages ​​of this family are generally tonal. There are no nominal classes, but some languages ​​have two grammatical genders. Sometimes the name has a case system. The verb in some languages ​​has a branched set of derived verb forms. Most of the languages ​​of the Negroid population of Africa that are not part of the Niger-Congo family belong to this family.

Shari-Nile subfamily.

Primary in a Sudanese family; formerly called macro-Sudanese. In turn, it is divided into two groups - eastern and central - and a number of separate languages. The eastern group includes the Nubian dialects of the Nile Valley, the Kordofan Plateau and Darfur, as well as the Nilotic languages: Western Nilotic (Shilluk, Dinka, Nuer, Lango), Eastern Nilotic (Masai, Bari, Turkana, Lotuho) and South Nilotic (Nandi -bitch). The last two subgroups in the classification are sometimes combined into the Nilo-Hamitic group. The central Shari-Nile group includes Mangbetu (Zaire) and Sara-Baghirmi languages ​​(Chad). In the Middle Ages, Christian literature existed in the Nubian language based on an alphabet derived from Coptic.

Sahara subfamily.

Another important subdivision of the Sudanese family, including Kanuri (the language of the native kingdom of Bornu near Lake Chad), Teda and Daza (eastern regions of the Sahara).

Other Sudanese languages.

The Maba (Wadai region) and Fur (the dominant language of Darfur) languages ​​spoken in Sudan form smaller subdivisions of the Sudanese family. It, in all likelihood, also includes Songhai (the language of the medieval Negroid empire with the capital Timbuktu, now a city in Mali) and a small group of Koman languages ​​(areas on the border between Sudan and Ethiopia). In general, the Sudanese languages ​​are spoken over a wide area north and east of the Niger-Congo languages.

Clicking tongues.

This family is divided into three subfamilies, the largest of which is the Khoisan, distributed in South Africa and, in turn, falling into three groups: northern, central and southern. Khoisan languages ​​are spoken by the Bushmen and Hottentots; The Hottentot languages ​​belong to the central group of the Khoisan family. The remaining two subfamilies of clicking languages ​​are the Sandawe and Hatsa languages ​​spoken in Tanzania, i.e. far north of the Khoisan languages.

Clicking languages ​​got their name due to the presence of peculiar “clicking” sounds in them, used similarly to ordinary consonants and not found anywhere in the world except Africa. The articulatory interpretation of these consonants is debatable; they were often described as implosive, i.e. pronounced on inspiration; now it is believed that they are pronounced due to sucking movements with little or no participation of the lungs, and therefore they are distinguished into a special group of "non-respiratory" consonants, opposed to all others, both ordinary explosive and rarer implosive. In addition to the languages ​​of this family, these sounds are found only in some Bantu languages, being a borrowing from the Khoisan languages. Sandawe and some Central Khoisan (including Hottentot) languages ​​have a category of grammatical gender.

Other African languages.

In addition to the four families described above, on the African continent there are also languages ​​​​of the island of Madagascar, belonging to the Austronesian family and very different from the mainland African languages, as well as the Meroitic language, which was once spoken at the confluence of the White and Blue Nile and which had a script based on ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs; in the current state of knowledge, Meroitic cannot be genetically related to any other language.

Main language and people of Africa

First letter "b"

Second letter "a"

Third letter "n"

The last beech is the letter "y"

Answer for the clue "The main language and people of Africa", 5 letters:
Bantu

Alternative questions in crossword puzzles for the word Bantu

Group of peoples in Africa

african. language

peoples of africa

African language

Language family, group

South African language group

African group of languages

Mix of the word "herd"

Bantu word definitions in dictionaries

New explanatory and derivational dictionary of the Russian language, T. F. Efremova. The meaning of the word in the dictionary New explanatory and derivational dictionary of the Russian language, T. F. Efremova.
pl. non-cl. The peoples who make up the main population of most of the countries of Central, Eastern and Southern Africa and speak related languages. representatives of these peoples. pl. non-cl. Related languages ​​belonging to the Kongo-Kordofan ethno-linguistic family....

Wikipedia The meaning of the word in the Wikipedia dictionary
Bantu is a group of Bantu languages ​​of the Benue-Congo family. Distributed in sub-Saharan Africa from Nigeria and Cameroon in the west to Kenya in the east and south of the continent, including South Africa. There is no exact data on the number of speakers. Bantu languages ​​are widely used...

Examples of the use of the word Bantu in literature.

Rubens invited Dan to carry out the same calculations in the Amharic, Tigri and Danakil languages, and to me - in the languages Bantu.

Really, thought Jeremiah the Archpastor, will I finally meet those whom I hunt - the leader himself Bantu Blackbeard or his bloodthirsty assistant.

Scobie turned the page and hesitated for a moment when he saw a photograph of the archpastor in a white suit with a high pastoral collar and a tropical helmet: he was playing cricket and was just about to hit the ball thrown by a tribal negro Bantu.

She reassured herself that no special preparations were required to reproduce her appearance at that time, for white was once and for all - and everyone knew it - her favorite color, therefore, she had the right to it, and only to pink bows, especially to missing Bantu on the bodice, and her whole school trick was reduced, from the thought of which now, when she was sitting in the carriage with her hair up high, intercepted by a ribbon, not a little envious of the others’ non-symbolizing outfits, her heart still beat in stubbornly thievish and joyful expectation.

Pip, closing his eyes, remembered the badger Bantu, to whom he said his famous phrase for the first time, and Sheffi, snorting in displeasure, anxiously examined the unfamiliar place.