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| Language Endangerment Status | |
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 UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger categories | |
This is a list of extinct languages of Africa , languages which have undergone language death, have no native speakers and no spoken descendant. There are 57 languages listed.
The Afroasiatic languages, also known as Hamito-Semitic or Semito-Hamitic, are a language family of about 400 languages spoken predominantly in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahara and Sahel. Over 500 million people are native speakers of an Afroasiatic language, constituting the fourth-largest language family after Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, and Niger–Congo. Most linguists divide the family into six branches: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Semitic, and Omotic. The vast majority of Afroasiatic languages are considered indigenous to the African continent, including all those not belonging to the Semitic branch.
The Bantu languages are a language family of about 600 languages that are spoken by the Bantu peoples of Central, Southern, Eastern and Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages.
The Berber languages, also known as the Amazigh languages or Tamazight, are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They comprise a group of closely related but mostly mutually unintelligible languages spoken by Berber communities, who are indigenous to North Africa. The languages are primarily spoken and not typically written. Historically, they have been written with the ancient Libyco-Berber script, which now exists in the form of Tifinagh. Today, they may also be written in the Berber Latin alphabet or the Arabic script, with Latin being the most pervasive.
There are over 250 languages indigenous to Europe, and most belong to the Indo-European language family. Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language. The three largest phyla of the Indo-European language family in Europe are Romance, Germanic, and Slavic; they have more than 200 million speakers each, and together account for close to 90% of Europeans.
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family—English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish—have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, of which there are eight groups with languages still alive today: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic; another nine subdivisions are now extinct.
The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic, Amharic, Aramaic, Hebrew, and numerous other ancient and modern languages. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Malta, and in large immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe, and Australasia. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis.
The number of languages natively spoken in Africa is variously estimated at between 1,250 and 2,100, and by some counts at over 3,000. Nigeria alone has over 500 languages, one of the greatest concentrations of linguistic diversity in the world. The languages of Africa belong to many distinct language families, among which the largest are:
An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead language". If no one can speak the language at all, it becomes an "extinct language". A dead language may still be studied through recordings or writings, but it is still dead or extinct unless there are fluent speakers. Although languages have always become extinct throughout human history, they are currently dying at an accelerated rate because of globalization, mass migration, cultural replacement, imperialism, neocolonialism and linguicide.
Afar is an Afroasiatic language belonging to the Cushitic branch. It is spoken by the Afar people inhabiting Djibouti, Eritrea and Ethiopia.
ǁXegwi, also known as Batwa, is an extinct ǃKwi language spoken at Lake Chrissie in South Africa, near the Swazi border. The last known speaker, Jopi Mabinda, was murdered in 1988. However, a reporter for the South African newspaper Mail & Guardian reports that ǁXegwi may still be spoken in the Chrissiesmeer district.
Ethio-Semitic is a family of languages spoken in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Sudan. They form the western branch of the South Semitic languages, itself a sub-branch of Semitic, part of the Afroasiatic language family.
The Gafat language is an extinct South Ethiopic language once spoken by the Gafat people along the Blue Nile in Ethiopia, and later, speakers pushed south of Gojjam in what is now East Welega Zone. Gafat was related to the Harari language and Eastern Gurage languages. The records of this language are extremely sparse. There is a translation of the Song of Songs written in the 17th or 18th Century held at the Bodleian Library.
South Semitic is a putative branch of the Semitic languages, which form a branch of the larger Afro-Asiatic language family, found in Africa and Western Asia.
The languages of Ethiopia include the official languages of Ethiopia, its national and regional languages, and a large number of minority languages, as well as foreign languages.
The main languages spoken in Eritrea are Tigrinya, Tigre, Kunama, Bilen, Nara, Saho, Afar, and Beja. The country's working languages are Tigrinya, Arabic, English.
Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples or Proto-Semitic people were speakers of Semitic languages who lived throughout the ancient Near East and North Africa, including the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula and Carthage from the 3rd millennium BC until the end of antiquity, with some, such as Arabs, Arameans, Assyrians, Jews, Mandaeans, and Samaritans having a continuum into the present day.
In 1975 I interviewed Jopi Mabinda, the last //Xegwi speaker. He was able to reproduce perfectly the linguistic material he had given to Lanham and Hallowes and he was fluent in Zulu. He told me he was the only speaker of the language and that he spoke it to his sister and brother-in-law, who only had a passive knowledge of it. He was murdered at Lothair, in the eastern Transvaal, in 1988
Became extinct between 1920 and 1940.
Reported in 1999 to still be spoken in the central Massai Steppe.
Coptic is the name of the final stage of the ancient Egyptian language, spoken and written from the fourth century AD until perhaps sometime in the seventeenth century.
Until c. 1800 AD.
Following the Roman invasion of Egypt in 30 BC the use of hieroglyphics began to die out with the last known writing in the fifth century AD.
Gafat was a Semitic language spoken in the region of the Blue Nile, in western Ethiopia. At present, the language disappeared completely in favour of Amharic. Its study is based mainly on a translation of the Song of Songs made from Amharic into Gafat in 1769-72 at the request of James Bruce and on the ample documentation collected in 1947 by W. Leslau from four native speakers.
The now-dead language Gbin belonged to the South branch of the Mande linguistic family; as recently as one hundred years ago Gbin speakers lived in the city of Bondoukou and its surroundings.
...Ge'ez or Ethiopic. It ceased to be a spoken tongue in the fourteenth century A.D.
Extinct in the 16th century.
Extinct in 1975.
On 4 November 1995, Kasabe existed; on 5 November, it did not.
J. C. Winter (1981) says it is extinct. There were 3 speakers in 1971 who used it regularly (E. O. J. Westphal).
Even towards the end of the Mamluk period, during the reign of the last sultan al-Ghawri (1501-1516), the Mamluk, called Asanbay min Sudun, copied the religious Hanbali tract of Abu al-Layth in Kypchak language for the royal library.
200 BC - 4th century AD.
Extinct c 1400 AD..
There was 1 speaker in 1976.
Use began to diminish in the 1950s.
C. Ehret was reported to be working with the last speaker (M. L. Bender 1976:280). Confirmed by R. Kiessling (1999).
c. 200 BC.
8th - 15th centuries AD.
The earliest dated Palmyrene inscription is from the year 44 BC and the latest discovery has been dated to the year 274 AD.
1st Millennium BC - 600 AD.
100 BC - 600 AD.
5th century AD.
