The Bantu languages are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu peoples in the southern half of Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages.
The Cushitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken primarily in the Horn of Africa, with minorities speaking Cushitic languages to the north in Egypt and the Sudan, and to the south in Kenya and Tanzania. As of 2012, the Cushitic languages with over one million speakers were Oromo, Somali, Beja, Afar, Hadiyya, Kambaata, Saho, and Sidama.
The Khoisan languages are a group of African languages originally classified together by Joseph Greenberg. Khoisan languages share click consonants and do not belong to other African language families. For much of the 20th century, they were thought to be genealogically related to each other, but this is no longer accepted. They are now held to comprise three distinct language families and two language isolates.
Niger-Congo is a hypothetical language family spoken over nearly the entirety of sub-Saharan Africa. It unites the Mande languages, the Atlantic-Congo languages, and possibly several smaller groups of languages that are difficult to classify. If valid, Niger-Congo would be the world's largest in terms of member languages, the third-largest in terms of speakers, and Africa's largest in terms of geographical area. It is generally considered to be the world's largest language family in terms of the number of distinct languages, just ahead of Austronesian, although this is complicated by the ambiguity about what constitutes a distinct language; the number of named Niger-Congo languages listed by Ethnologue is 1,540.
Swahili, also known by its native name Kiswahili, is a Bantu language and the native language of the Swahili people. It is a lingua franca of the African Great Lakes region and other parts of East and Southern Africa, including Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, some parts of Malawi, Somalia, Zambia, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Comorian, spoken in the Comoros Islands, is sometimes considered a dialect of Swahili, although other authorities consider it a distinct language. Sixteen to twenty percent of Swahili vocabulary is Arabic loanwords, including the word swahili, from Arabic sawāḥilī. The Arabic loanwords date from the contacts of Arabian traders with the Bantu inhabitants of the east coast of Africa over many centuries. Under Arab trade influence, Swahili emerged as a lingua franca used by Arab traders and Bantu peoples of the East African Coast.
The languages of Africa are divided into several major language families:
Xhosa also isiXhosa as an endonym, is a Nguni Bantu language and one of the official languages of South Africa and Zimbabwe. Xhosa is spoken as a first language by approximately 8.2 million people and by another 11 million as a second language in South Africa, mostly in Eastern Cape, Western Cape, Gauteng and Northern Cape. It has perhaps the heaviest functional load of click consonants in a Bantu language, with one count finding that 10% of basic vocabulary items contained a click.
Southern Ndebele, also known as Transvaal Ndebele or South Ndebele, is an African language belonging to the Nguni group of Bantu languages, spoken by the Ndebele people of South Africa.
Khoisan, or according to the contemporary Khoekhoegowab orthography Khoe-Sān, is a catch-all term for those indigenous peoples of Southern Africa, who don't speak one of the Bantu languages, combining the Khoekhoen and the Sān or Sākhoen.
The Bantu expansion was a major series of migrations of the original Proto-Bantu-speaking group, which spread from an original nucleus around West-Central Africa across much of sub-Saharan Africa. In the process, the Proto-Bantu-speaking settlers displaced or absorbed pre-existing hunter-gatherer and pastoralist groups that they encountered.
The Abagusii is an East African ethnic group with diverse origins that largely and inevitably originate from the Neolithic Agropastoralist and hunter/gatherer inhabitants of present-day Kenya particularly former Nyanza and Rift Valley provinces of Kenya. These Neolithic Agropastoralists were of the same stock as the ancestors of the modern Nilotes, Omotics and Cushites as well as the ancient East African hunter/gatherers similar to Ogiek and are the original progenitors of the majority of the modern Abagusii people. However, a minority of the Abagusii are believed to have been assimilated from the Luhya and Olusuba speaking Suba people (Kenya) that are believed to have migrated from the West of Lake Victoria that is present-day Buganda and Busoga in 1800s hence originally from Central Africa/West Africa by the way of Bantu expansion. The majority of Abagusii are closely related to the Maasai, Kipsigis, Abakuria, and Ameru of Kenya. They also have close linguistic relationship with Ngurimi, Rangi, Mbugwe, Simbiti, Zanaki and Ikoma people. However, a lot of evidence from studies of East African Bantu languages and anthropology suggests that the Abagusii and the mentioned related tribes emerged from the neolithic Agropastoralists and hunters/gatherers of East Africa believed to have come from the North of Mt. Elgon. The Abagusii traditionally/natively inhabit Kisii County and Nyamira County of former Nyanza Province of Kenya as well as parts of Kericho County and Bomet County of the former Rift Valley province of Kenya. The Abagusii are also found in other regions of geographical Western Kenya including former Nyanza Province such as Homa Bay County, and the rest of Luo-Nyanza as well as the rest of Kenya through recent migrations in post-colonial Kenya. There is also a significant diaspora population of Abagusii in countries such as United States, United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa among other countries within and outside Africa. The Abagusii speak Ekegusii language which is classified together with the Great Lakes Bantu languages. However, the inclusion of Abagusii in the Bantu language group is a subject of debate given that studies on East African Bantu languages have found the Ekegusii together with Kuria, Simbiti, Ngurimi, Rangi and Mbugwe languages to be far distinct from the typical Bantu in terms of structure and tense aspect. Mogusii is culturally identified as their founder and patriarch. The Abagusii are however, unrelated to the Kisi people of Malawi and the Kissi people of West Africa, other than the three very distinct communities having similar sounding tribal names. The traditional occupation of Abagusii in pre-colonial Kenya included hunting and gathering, pastoralism/herding and cereal, fruit (pumpkin) and root crop farming forms of Agriculture with pastoralism being the dominant occupation of Abagusii in pre-colonial Kenya. Today the Abagusii have adopted other forms of agriculture through interaction with the European colonists that introduced new crops and new cultivation methods to Gusiiland and Kenya as a whole with the same applying to the other African countries/communities. Some of these factors have ensured farming to be the most dominant economic activity among Abagusii as opposed to pre-colonial Kenya where they were pre-dominantly pastoralists and hunters and gatherers.
Khwe is a dialect continuum of the Khoe family of Namibia, Angola, Botswana, South Africa, and parts of Zambia, with some 8,000 speakers.
Hadza is a language isolate spoken along the shores of Lake Eyasi in Tanzania by around 1,000 Hadza people, who include in their number the last full-time hunter-gatherers in Africa. It is one of only three languages in East Africa with click consonants. Despite the small number of speakers, language use is vigorous, with most children learning it, but UNESCO categorizes the language as vulnerable.
Kenya is a multilingual country. The Bantu Swahili language and English, the latter being inherited from colonial rule, are widely spoken as lingua franca. They serve as the two official working languages. Including second-language speakers, there are more speakers of Swahili than English in Kenya.
South African Bantu-speaking peoples are the majority of Black South Africans. Occasionally grouped as Bantu, the term itself is derived from the word for "people" common to many of the Bantu languages. The Oxford Dictionary of South African English describes its contemporary usage in a racial context as "obsolescent and offensive" because of its strong association with white minority rule with their Apartheid system. However, Bantu is used without pejorative connotations in other parts of Africa and is still used in South Africa as the group term for the language family.
The population of Africa has grown rapidly over the past century and consequently shows a large youth bulge, further reinforced by a low life expectancy of below 50 years in some African countries. Total population as of 2020 is estimated at more than 1.341 billion, with a growth rate of more than 2.5% p.a. The total fertility rate for Sub-Saharan Africa is 4.7 as of 2018, the highest in the world according to the World Bank. The most populous African country is Nigeria with over 206 million inhabitants as of 2020 and a growth rate of 2.6% p.a.
The Prehistory of South Africa lasts from the Middle Stone Age until the 17th century. Southern Africa was first reached by Homo sapiens before 130,000 years ago, possibly before 260,000 years ago. The region remained in the Late Stone Age until the first traces of pastoralism were introduced about 2,000 years ago. The Bantu migration reached the area now South Africa around the first decade of the 3rd century, over 1800 years ago, largely displacing the indigenous Khoisan population.Early Bantu kingdoms were established by the 11th century. First European contact dates to 1488, but European colonization began in the 17th century.
Tanzania is a multilingual country. There are many languages spoken in the country, but no one language is spoken natively by a majority or a large plurality of the population. Swahili and English, the latter of which was inherited from colonial rule, are widely spoken as lingua francas. They serve as working languages in the country, with Swahili being the official national language. There are more speakers of Swahili than of English in Tanzania.
Taita Cushitic is an extinct pair of South Cushitic languages, spoken by Cushitic peoples inhabiting the Taita Hills of Kenya, before they were assimilated into the Bantu population after the Bantu Migration into East Africa. Evidence for the languages is primarily South Cushitic loanwords in the Bantu languages Dawida and Saghala, as well as oral traditions of the Dawida and Saghala.
