What do Africans say? English?

African languages mainly belong to four language families:

1, Semitic language family (including 240 languages, used by 285 million people);

2. Nilo-Saharan language family (including 100 languages, spoken by 30 million people, mainly distributed in Chad, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, Uganda, northern Tanzania and other regions);

3. Niger-Congo language family (one of the largest language families in the world, including hundreds of languages, distributed in sub-Saharan Africa, including Bantu);

4. Khoisan (including 50 languages, spoken by 65,438+200,000 people, concentrated in southern Africa).

With the invasion of European colonial countries, most African countries adopted non-African languages as official languages, but now there are also local languages, such as Swahili, as official languages of African countries such as Kenya and Tanzania.

Non-native languages widely used in Africa include Arabic, French, English, Portuguese, South African and Madagascar, which belong to Semitic, Indo-European and Austronesian languages.

Extended data:

Africa is the continent with the longest history of human civilization. Since Darwin put forward the idea that human beings originated in Africa in 187 1, the world archaeological community has provided a lot of physical evidence, indicating that Africa, especially East Africa and South Africa, may be the earliest birthplace of human beings.

There are five stages in the evolution from Australopithecus to modern humans: Lamarckian, Australopithecus, Homo erectus (Homo erectus), early Homo sapiens and late Homo sapiens. These fossils have all been found in Africa, and their evolution process is more continuous than other continents, and the time of each stage is earlier, which indicates that Africa is probably the birthplace of human beings.

After the rise of modern molecular biology, it is further proved that all modern homo sapiens originated in Africa. Modern molecular biology uses genetic tools to analyze maternal mitochondria and paternal Y chromosomes of African, European and Asian races. It was found that the common ancestor of different races was14.3-144,000 years ago. Modern Homo sapiens walked out of Africa 50,000-70,000 years ago.

Baidu Encyclopedia-Africa