Here Are The Top 5 African Languages Everyone Should Be Learning!

Africa and Africans have been excluded from the world narrative for long enough. Everything from the African origins of Christianity to the scientific contributions of the Black world to humanity have been ignored at best and discredited at worst.

There are nearly 300 Million Africans that use social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram. These Africans speak languages that are not supported by the translate function that social media platforms have built into their system. For the languages that are supported, the translators will either offer bad or completely incorrect translations.

This wouldnt be an issue except for the fact that almost every obscure European language is supported. The vast majority of Asian languages are supported. African languages are ignored.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. So on May 25th, we have raised our collective voices to demand social media platforms like Twitter end its exclusion of its more than 300 million African users.

The goal of the African Languages movement is to demand that social network sites, especially @Twitter , include native African languages in their translation services.

More Africans are entering global economic, political, and intellectual spaces and as our influence grows it will become increasingly more important for non-African language speakers to get caught up.

Here are 5 of the most widely spoken languages to get you started.

Swahili

🇰🇪🇷🇼🇹🇿🇧🇮 🇨🇩 🇲🇿 🇿🇦 🇴🇲 🇸🇴 🇺🇬 🇦🇪 🇸🇸

There are anywhere from 50 million to over 100 million Kiswahili speakers. That means with a population of 1.2 Billion, more than 10 percent of the African population already shares the same language.

Swahili is also easy to learn compared to other languages. Thats because changing the tone of a word doesnt change its meaning (as is the case with Igbo and other Niger-Congo Languages). Verb conjugation is straight forward, and the language uses the noun class system. So if you are a native English or African speaker, you will pick up on Swahili quickly and easily.

Hausa

🇬🇭 🇨🇲 🇨🇮 🇸🇸🇲🇿

With more than 60 million speakers, Hausa is one of the most efficient languages on the African continent. Native speakers use a limited vocabulary on a day to day basis, so by learning just a few words and phrases, you will be able to get by!

Learning Hausa for business would also put you at a huge advantage in Ghana, one of Africa’s strongest democracies and economies.

Yoruba

🇳🇬 🇧🇯 🇹🇬

If you are looking for more of a challenge, try Yoruba. There are more than 40 million people who speak the tonal language across Nigeria and in the neighboring countries of the Republic of Benin and Togo. Nigeria has the largest economy on the African continent and there are Nigerians all over the planet. Learning Yoruba can help make important connections with some of Africa’s most influential people

Fulani

🇳🇪 🇸🇳 🇲🇷 🇲🇱 🇬🇳

With 27 million speakers across a huge part of West Africa, Fulani is a valuable language to learn if you want to truly understand African dialects. Thats because Fulani is one of the oldest languages in West Africa, and is closely related to other regional dialects. That means learning Fulani will make it easier to learn other languages in the area.

Start Learning Now!

Even if you dont plan on learning an African language for business or academia, being multi-lingual is a powerful way to increase your intelligence and job opportunities.

17 Languages uses an accelerated learning program that cuts the amount of time it takes to learn a language in half. Not only does 17 Languages have Swahili online courses, they also have hundreds of other languages.

So support African Languages, ✔️click here to learn Swahili and check out all the other languages available at 17Languages.com!

Kwaheri!