Language Families: Africa

To give an idea of the massive amount of linguistic diversity in the world, I thought I'd give a tour of the various language families that the world's languages can be divided into. As I mentioned in an earlier posts, linguists classify languages based on genetic relationships - language A and language B can be shown to be genetically related to each other if they share a common ancestral language C from which they both evolved.
I'll begin with Africa, the continent from which modern humans originated and spread across the globe. Through research in the 1950s and 60s, the American linguist Joseph Greenberg determined the classification of African languages that is most widely accepted in the linguistic community today. He divided the languages of mainland Africa into four distinct language families - Khoisan, Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Afro-Asiatic.
The Khoisan languages are today spoken in southwestern Africa, mostly in Namibia and Botswana; a few are spoken in eastern Africa, in Tanzania. These languages are spoken by ethnic groups that used to be known as "bushmen", but are now known as the Khoikhoi and the San. The Khoisan languages are well-known for their use of click consonants, which neighboring non-Khoisan langauges like Xhosa and Zulu have borrowed. The language of the people featured in the film "The Gods Must Be Crazy" was a Khoisan language.
The Niger-Congo languages cover most of the remainder of sub-Saharan Africa, from Senegal across West Africa to Kenya, all of equatorial Africa, and down to South Africa. The largest sub-branch of Niger-Congo is known as Bantu, and covers all of central and most of southern Africa. Well known Bantu languages include Kiswahili, Lingala, isiZulu, Sindebele, Chichewa, Kinyarwanda, and KiKongo. Non-Bantu Niger-Congo languages include Ewe, Yoruba, Igbo, Wolof, and the Mande languages, all spoken in West Africa between Senegal and Cameroon. The Niger-Congo languages are characterized by tones and by a complex system of noun classes.
The Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken in an arc through north-central Africa from Kenya in the east to Mali in the west. Major languages of this family include Kanuri and Songhay, spoken in the Niger and Mali region, the Maasai language of southern Kenya, Dinka, spoken in southern Sudan, and the Fur language of Darfur, Sudan. One ancient language that belonged to this family was Nubian, spoken in today's Sudan. The Nilo-Saharan family is generally accepted as a valid one, but some linguists propose that its subbranches should be considered separate language families in their own right.
Finally, the Afro-Asiatic language family covers all of North Africa as well as the Horn region (Ethiopia and Somalia). This family also has members in western Asia, hence its name. There are six recognized sub-families: Omotic, Cushitic, Chadic, Berber, Egyptian, and Semitic. The Omotic languages are spoken by tribal communities in southern Ethiopia, and were probably the first group to diverge from the ancestral Proto-Afro-Asiatic language. The Cushitic languages are found in Ethiopia and Somalia; Somali is the most widely-spoken and well-known member. The Chadic languages are spoken in northern Nigeria and southern Niger as well as adjacent regions; the principal member is Hausa, an important trade language of the Niger river area. The Berber languages were historically spoken throughout the Sahara and northwestern Africa before the Islamic conquest; today they can be found in scattered areas through Morocco, Algeria, Mali, and other nations. Tuaregh is perhaps the best-known member. The Egyptian branch included the ancient Egyptian language, which today survives in the form of the Coptic language of Egypt's Christian community. Finally, the Semitic branch, the largest of the family by number of speakers, is found across North Africa and into the Middle East. The most important member is Arabic, including the many vernacular varieties; Hebrew and Modern Aramaic are other modern members, as are the Amharic, Tigre, and Tigrinya languages, the principal languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea. Many well-known civilizations of antiquity spoke Semitic languages, including the Akkadians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Canaanites, the Phoenicians, and the Aramaeans. Three semitic languages are today important religious languages: Hebrew (Jewish scriptures), Aramaic (Jewish and Christian scriptures), and Arabic (Islamic scriptures). One of the distinguishing features of the Afro-Asiatic languages, and particularly the Semitic languages, is a template morphology, where three-consonant roots with a general meaning have patterns of vowels and affixes added to them with specific grammatical functions in order to produce the vocabulary of the language. An example from Arabic is the root K-T-B, which has the general meaning "write"; some of its derivatives include kitaab "book", kataba "to write", maktuub "written", maktabat "library", iktitaab "subscription", etc.; another root, S-L-M, includes the derivations 'aslama "to submit", islaam "submission", muslim "one who submits", and salaam "peace".
It is thought that the Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo language families are related at a more remote level, while Afro-Asiatic is thought to be more closely related to language families in Eurasia. Khoisan, however, is distinct from most other language families, and is thought to be a survival of one of the first groups of languages to split from the ancestral human language (if indeed there was a single ancestral human language).