English is one of the most spoken languages in the world and many countries have adopted it as their official one.
Across the African continent, there are 27 out of 54 nations speaking English as their official or second language.
Despite this, among the 1.2 billion people living in Africa only around 6.5 million people speak English as their native language.
Nevertheless, hundreds of millions of people on the continent are estimated to know or speak the language to some degree, due in part to its widespread presence in government and education.
Africa is home to an estimated 2,000 languages – or even 3,000 languages according to the most liberal estimates.
While some are widely adopted by millions throughout the continent and are known by even more people around the world, other languages are linked to villages and communities and are destined to soon become extinct, as they are now known only by a few elders.
According to language-teaching company Fluentu, these are the top 10 languages in Africa.
1. Arabic
Millions of people in Africa grow up speaking Arabic as their native language. It is the official language in Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania among other countries, but it is also widely spoken in other nations. While millions of people in Africa speak Arabic, many of them will have adopted local dialects, unique to the regions from which they are from.
2. French
Due to France’s colonial history, French remains the official language in several African countries and is still widely spoken in the north, west and central Africa. Much like with Arabic, each African region has adopted its own French accent.
3. Swahili
Known as Kiswahili in the language itself, Swahili is the most important and widely studied indigenous language of Africa. Kenya and Tanzania have adopted it as their official language, but Swahili speakers can be found across several other parts of Africa. Swahili is part of the large Bantu language family, deriving from the proto-Bantu language that originated more than 2,500 years ago.
4. Hausa
While this language is primarily spoken in Nigeria and Niger, it serves as a lingua franca across many Muslim populations in west Africa. Hausa can be written using both the Arabic and Latin alphabet.
5. Igbo
Igbo is, like Hausa, a tonal language – which means words can differ in tones in addition to consonants and vowels. The language, which counts six tones, used to be written in ideograms, but has now adopted the Latin script with some additional letter combinations to express its sounds.
6. Yoruba
Yoruba is primarily spoken in west Africa, particularly central and southwestern Nigeria, and by people of Yoruba ethnicity. The number of Yoruba native speakers is roughly 44 million, with at least two million more considered second-language speakers.
7. Berber
Spoken mainly in Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Mali, Mauritania, Burkino Faso and the Siwa Oasis of Egypt, Berber encompasses a group of closely related languages spoken by Berber communities indigenous to northern Africa. Despite the large presence of French and Arabic speakers in the area, Berber is the native language of millions particularly in Morocco, which recognises it as one of its main languages.
8. Oromo
Around 35 million people are believed to be speaking Oromo, which is native to the Ethiopian region of Oromia. The language has been traditionally spoken by ethnic groups living in the Horn of Africa.
9. Portuguese
Much like French, the large presence of Portuguese speakers in Africa is a remnant of colonialism. It is the official language in a number of nations, including Angola and Mozambique, and it is also one of the official languages of the African Union – a group promoting the unity and solidarity of African nations, their sovereignty and cooperation.
10. Amharic
Amharic has been the official language of Ethiopia since at least the 12th century. Written left-to-right, is the second-most widely spoken Semitic language after Arabic.
