African Languages

The African Tongue with Asian Roots

Journey to the great island of Madagascar, a biodiversity hotspot floating off the coast of Mozambique. You might assume its…

1 week ago

From Pidgin to Power: Nigeria’s Voice

Often dismissed as "broken English", Nigerian Pidgin is in fact a dynamic creole language spoken by over 75 million people.…

1 week ago

The Great Script Divide: Ge’ez vs. Latin in Ethiopia

In Ethiopia's vibrant digital spaces, a cultural and linguistic battle is underway. The ancient, elegant Ge’ez script, a cornerstone of…

2 weeks ago

Swahili’s 18 Noun Classes

Forget the simple "he" or "she" of European languages. Swahili categorizes its nouns into at least 18 different classes, a…

2 weeks ago

The Double Negatives of Afrikaans

Ever heard an Afrikaans speaker say "Ek praat nie Afrikaans nie" and wondered about that extra "nie"? This seemingly redundant…

2 weeks ago

The Fluid Verb: Tense and Aspect in Swahili

Swahili verbs are masterpieces of modular design, built by "gluing" prefixes for tense, person, and more onto a single root.…

2 weeks ago

The Amharic ‘And’: A Verb’s Best Friend

In English, we connect actions with a simple 'and.' But in Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia, this conjunction is…

2 weeks ago

The Vai Script: A Dreamed-Up Alphabet

In the 1830s, an illiterate Vai man in West Africa named Momolu Duwalu Bukele had a vivid dream where he…

3 weeks ago

Parsing the Unparsable: The Dhaasanac Language

Journey to the Omo Valley to meet the Dhaasanac people of Ethiopia, whose language defies easy categorization. Instead of marking…

3 weeks ago

The Great Bantu Migration: How a Language Family Shaped Half a Continent

Over several millennia, a wave of migration spread a single language family from West-Central Africa to cover nearly the entire…

3 weeks ago

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