Easy To Learn African Languages
By Chris Owusu-Barfi
Africa is the second largest continent in the world and it is made up of 54 different countries. Each country in Africa is made up of different ethnic groups with different customs and languages. Due to this, there are over 2,000 dialects spoken on the African continent; this makes Africa home to one-third of the languages spoken in the world. Out of these 2,000 dialects spoken, at least 75 (3.75%) of them have over one million speakers. Some of these languages are also becoming extinct due to lack of speakers, difficulty to read and write and difficult to understand. For example, N/uu, a local dialect spoken in South Africa, has one (Simon Sauls) remaining fluent speaker alive.
Source: utalk.com
There are also easy to learn languages in Africa. These languages include, Igbo (Nigeria), Yoruba (Nigeria), Twi (Ghana), Swahili ( Kenya, Tanzania, Comoros, Uganda, Burundi and Malawi), Hausa (Nigeria, Ghana, Niger, Ivory Coast, Sudan, Burkina Faso and Chad).
Source: exploringafrica.matrix.msu.edu
Swahili is one of the easiest African languages to learn. The name Swahili comes from the Arabic word “of the coast”. It is also called Kiswahili, with the Ki meaning “language”. It has no strict lexis to follow and words are read just the way they are written. It also has simple grammar structures and vocabulary that is fairly easy to remember. Swahili is also the most widely spoken language in Sub-Saharan Africa. It has over 150 million speakers from over 10 African Countries. Swahili is the second language of many speakers since it is used as a lingua franca for many Africans. This makes it easy to find people to speak the language with and help you practice.
The Yoruba language is one of the most scholastically studied indigenous West African language. This makes it easy to find literature to read and makes it one of the easiest African languages to learn. There are over 30 million speakers of Yoruba in West Africa (Nigeria, Togo and Benin).
The Twi dialect is the most widely spoken dialect in Ghana. Twi is a tonal language. This means different words with different tonal inflections will convey different meanings. It is easy to learn and understand since it has simple grammar structures and vocabulary that is easy to recall. Twi has about 8 million speakers and about 85% of the Ghanaian population speak the dialect as their first or second language.
Most of these languages are easy to learn due they having millions of daily speakers, availability of literature to read, easy grammatical structure, being made popular through music (afrobeats) and availability of podcast and apps (NKENNE) to assist in learning them.