A Bird’s Eye View Key Note Address - Kithaka Wa Mberia

Abstract

Colleagues, ladies and gentlemen,
Allow me to begin this address by contextualizing Kiswahili within the African linguistic terrain.
Some linguists put the number of languages spoken in the world at about 7, 000. Roughly, a third of these languages is spoken in Africa (see, for example, Gordon (2005)). The approximately 2,000 languages are grouped into four language families, namely, Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan,
Afro-Asiatic and Khoisan (Greenberg, 1963).