Noun1.Niger-Kordofanian language- the family of languages that includes most of the languages spoken in Africa south of the Sahara; the majority of them are tonal languages but there are important exceptions (e.g., Swahili or Fula)
Swahili at a glance Native name: Kiswahili [kiswahili] Language family: Niger-Congo, Atlantic-Congo, Benue-Congo, Southern Bantoid, Bantu, Northeast Coast Bantu, Sabaki Number of speakers: c. 200 million Spoken in: Burundi, DR Congo, Kenya, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and many ot...
Swahili, or Kiswahili, belongs to the larger Benue-Congo branch of theNiger-Congo language family. The name comes from the plural of the Arabic wordsawāhil‘coast’. ‘Ki-‘ is a prefix attached to nouns of the noun class that includes languages. Swahili is spoken in East Africa by diff...
While Romanian has much in common with other Romance languages, it features several grammatical quirks that separate it from the rest. As a result, many people consider it the hardest language to learn in this language family.In many ways, Romanian remains truer to its Latin roots than other ...
A family spread from Europe () through Centra Asia (), to the Far East (,Japanese). These languages have the interesting property of vowel harmony. The Sino-Tibetan Family An important Asian family of languages that includes the world's most spoken language,Mandarin. These languages are monosy...
For language-buffs even Pingu’s name is intriguing. Although real-life penguins come from the Antarctic, in the Southern Hemisphere, Pingu and his family live in an Igloo, an ice-house found only in the Arctic. By a strange coincidence the Inuits (Eskimos) who invented the igloo have the...
Spoken mainly in the northern part of Tanzania (as well as over the border in Kenya), Maasai is an Eastern Nilotic language that is native to the Maasai people. A nomadic people who inhabit largely desert land, the Maasai have managed to resist much of the rise of Swahili and English in...
theSino-Tibetan family, which includes Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, and Standard Tibetan; theAfro-Asiaticfamily, which includes Arabic, Amharic, Somali, and Hebrew; the Bantu languages, which include Swahili, Zulu, Shona, and hundreds of other languages spoken throughout Africa; ...
was good enough to upload this fantastic guide to Academia.edu. In it, he provides categorizations, by region and language family, of pretty much every language for which documentation exists, along with references to the newest or most comprehensive studies of that language. Here’s Mongolian,...
learning languages, it’s as soon as yesterday. And if you’re wondering which language to start learning, we’d suggest a widely spoken language like the Spanish language. But it’s almost always best to start with a language that falls in the same language family as your native language...