55 % der 501 Sprachen Afrikas (prominente Sprachen) haben weniger als 100.000 Muttersprachler. Die meisten werden von Gemeinden gesprochen, die kleiner als eine mittelgroße Stadt sind. Ich habe mir die sprachliche Landschaft Afrikas vorgestellt, um das Ausmaß der sprachlichen Vielfalt zu verstehen. Ein paar Erkenntnisse:

    • Nur 40 Sprachen machen 80 % aller Sprecher aus.
    • Die Khoisan-Familie, die älteste Sprache der Erde, hat insgesamt nur 267.000 Sprecher in neun Sprachen.
    • Allein Arabisch ist einer von sechs Sprechern einer afrikanischen Sprache

    Von grinch_101

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    6 Kommentare

    1. ragnarockette on

      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.

    2. leatherknife on

      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.

    3. MinnieMouse2292 on

      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.

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