The closest number to the estimates is - C. 1,000.
The estimates suggest that there are between 1,500 and 2,000 languages spoken in Africa. The variations of the number is because there are still debates about lots of languages are they separate languages, or are they just dialects of other languages.
There are six groups of languages spoken on the African continent:
- Afroasiatic; mostly spoken in the northern part of the continent by people with Arabic descent.
- Nilo-Saharan; mostly spoken in the upper Nile flow, and in the central part of North Africa.
- Niger-Congo (Bantu and non-Bantu); the most widely dispersed group, spoken in Western Africa, and most of Central, East and South Africa.
- Khoisan; spoken in the western ans parts of the central part of South Africa.
- Indo-European; one of the two most recent languages, spoken mostly in RSA by the white European population.
- Austronesian; also a newly introduced language, spoken mostly on the island of Madagascar where the people are of Oceanic descent.
