Which African country is the westernmost?
Senegal
Cape Verde Peninsula, French Presqu’île du Cap Vert, peninsula in west-central Senegal that is the westernmost point of the African continent.
Which country in West Africa speaks English?
Liberia
Liberia is the only West African country in which English has more speakers than any other language. English is used as a lingua franca and a means of interethnic communication only in Nigeria (among the educated); in all other countries a pidgin or one or more African languages have this function.
What language do they speak in West Africa?
Except for Arabic and Hausa, the major languages are from the Niger-Congo family: Yoruba, Igbo, Fulfulde/Pulaar, Akan, and Wolof. However, the remaining language groups are well-represented as the continental sub-region is home to native speakers of over 500 languages.
Which region of Africa has the most language diversity?
Nigeria alone has over 500 languages (according to SIL Ethnologue), one of the greatest concentrations of linguistic diversity in the world.
What nationality is west African?
western Africa, region of the western African continent comprising the countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cabo Verde, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo.
Why do West Africans speak English?
History. West African Pidgin English arose during the period of the transatlantic slave trade as a language of commerce between British and African slave traders. The language quickly spread up the river systems into the West African interior because of its value as a trade language among Africans of different tribes.
What countries in Africa speak English?
Africa is home to over 1 billion people, of which a measly 130 million speak English. Although 27 out of 54 countries on the continent speak the English language as their official or secondary language, the number of English speakers, or rather people who are fluent in the language, isn’t as high as you might expect.
Is Arabic spoken in Nigeria?
The official language of Nigeria is English, the language of former colonial British Nigeria. As reported in 2003, Nigerian English and Nigerian Pidgin were spoken as a second language by 60 million people in Nigeria….Selected languages.
| Language | Total speakers (millions) |
|---|---|
| Arabic | 1 |
| Igala | 1 |
| French | 1 |
| Idoma | 0.8 |
How many languages are spoken in West Africa?
in West Africa. These languages are of very unequal importance. The 130 languages most spoken (with more than 200,000 speakers) represent more than 80% of the regional population i.e. 240 million people. And the first five languages alone are spoken by 120 million people (see Figure 1).
Why are there so many languages in West Africa?
One of the reasons for the continent’s rich linguistic diversity is simply down to time – people in Africa have had more time to develop languages than peoples elsewhere in the world. But the development of Africa’s languages is also due to cultural and political factors.