A dignified 2,000 distinct languages, spoken by less than a seventh of the world’s population. As an old continent, Africa’s unrivalled cultural diversity, and its contributions to world civilization, is a key to the eternal youth that draws us back to that place where the human race set off to discover our planet. By the same token, without culture and the relative freedom it implies, the stories of Africa would cease to be vibrant, for culture, in its novelty, embodies the credo, outlook, philosophy, arts, and institutions so dear to Africa.
It may be divulged that today, Africa’s cultural diversity is much over mingled with European traits. And this is true, considering her history. But, her diversity, sometimes referred to as Ubuntu (I am, because you are), more proper Africanity – the quality or state of being African or of having African origins – is the fundamental pillar for the assembly of her social fabric. It has, and continues to, credibly contribute to the survival and revival of the identity of the untold cultures; some confined to as small a geographical precinct as a village. It then may come as a surprise to realize even in Africa a language is lost every three months, and, if ethnographers forecasts are bang on, that 50% of the world’s languages will be lost in the 21st century. This comes at a time when there’s renewed interest in preserving dying dialects.
Despite the fact that Africa is an increasingly attractive context for business organizations throughout the world, only a hand ful of studies have examined the impact of culture on business in this context. And although the African continent is made up of 54 nations, only 12 have been included in at least one of the middlebrow cross-cultural studies in recent years.
As we now know, the total number of languages spoken natively across Africa is 2,000, although this can be variously estimated depending on the delineation of language versus dialect, at between 1,250 and 2,100, and by some counts almost 3,000. Making the language and cultural mosaic of Africa an indispensable part of the global diversity. Just the same, the entire principality and association of the languages in Africa is small, all its languages falling into four large phyla or language linguistic groups: Niger-Congo (Niger-Kordofanian), Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan.
Many of the prominent languages spoken across Central, Eastern and Southern Africa belong to the Bantu language family, the largest subgroup of Niger-Congo. In North Africa, across the Arabic belt, the main language family is the Afro-Asiatic, which includes languages spoken in both the Middle East and Africa. Subgroups of Afroasiatic include Berber, Cushitic, Omotic, Chadic, Semitic and Egyptian. Berber languages such as Tamazight, Kabyle, and Tuareg are spoken in North Africa. Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken mainly across the Sahara to eastern Africa, in countries like Mali, Chad, the Central African Republic and Ethiopia. “The Khoisan languages are not one family, but rather are consisted of Kx’a, Tuu and Khoe-Kwadi families in and around the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa, and isolates Hadza and Sandawe spoken in Tanzania.
A Guest Editorial