ABSTRACT
Africa is comprised of 54 independent countries, each with their own Indigenous peoples and languages. Of the 7,099 languages spoken in the world, about 2,144 languages are spoken on the African continent (Simons and Fennig 2017). The most populous country is Nigeria (186 million people) with approximately 527 languages; the smallest is Rwanda with 11,883,000 people (Simons and Fennig 2017). There are four languages said to be spoken in Rwanda: Kinyarwanda, English, French and Swahili (National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda 2012), and only one of these is Indigenous, i.e., Kinyarwanda. Although other African countries may not have Nigeria’s size, a complexity of Indigenous peoples and languages, which range from one or more million speakers to those which are on the verge of extinction, is typical of most. Multilingualism, whereby in any community more than one language or dialect may be spoken and any one person may be able to use two or three languages, is also typical.
