55% of Africa's 501 languages have fewer than 100,000 native speakers. Most are spoken by communities smaller than a mid-size town. I visualized Africa's linguistic landscape to understand the scale of linguistic diversity. A few findings:
- Just 40 languages account for 80% of all speakers.
- The Khoisan family, Earth's oldest language, has only 267,000 total speakers across 9 languages.
- Arabic alone represents 1 in 6 African language speakers
by grinch_101
5 Comments
data source(s): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Africa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Africa)
tool(s) : Tableau
I spent some time with the Hadzabe tribe a few years ago. They have a unique clicking language that developed totally separately from Xhosa, and only has about 1,500 speakers. However, their language is not considered endangered currently. I wonder how long that will last.
Can it be clarified why French isn’t included if Portuguese is?
Very nice visualisation! Nice colors, clear representation!
Small nitpicks: as your sources states in the first line, there are between 1250 and 3000 languages in Africa.
Also, Khoisan is not a family. It’s three families that are not related, and two isolates. Khoe-Kwadi (14 languages) and Tuu (9 languages), Kx’a and two isolates. It’s considered old in the sense that they have likely been spoken in the same area and by the ancestors of today’s speakers, but the languages themselves are descendants of other, proto-languages, like French is a descendant of Latin etc. As we have no scientific, external, natural way to decide when a language becomes a different one, there’s no way to say how old a language is.
Thank you this is stunning. I’m so surprised there are more Oromo speakers than Amharic and Somali speakers. We call them a minority in the Horn, but they are truly a majority.