There are over 2100 and by some counts over 3000 languages spoken natively in Africain several major language families. About a hundred of the languages of Africa are widely used for inter-ethnic communication. Arabic, Berber, Amharic, Somali, Oromo, Swahili, Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba are spoken by tens of millions of people. If clusters of up to a hundred similar languages are counted together, twelve are spoken by 75 percent, and fifteen by 85 percent, of Africans as a first or additional language.
