African languages

Fulfulde

Fulfulde belongs to the Niger-Congo languages; within this language family, the language is assigned to the West Atlantic group and forms the northern branch with Serer and Wolof.

Fulfulde is a class language, which means that nouns are summarised into individual groups (classes). Fulfulde has a total of 28 classes, which differ from each other in terms of morphological and grammatical elements. The language has a highly developed concordance system.

Information on Fulfulde (in German) (Martina Gajdos website)

Hausa

Hausa is one of the Chadian languages and is by far the largest of around 140 Chadian languages spoken roughly to the west, south and east of Lake Chad.
Like the majority of African languages, Hausa is also a tonal language, i.e. individual syllables in Hausa have a high tone, low tone or falling tone. In addition to pitch, vowel length can also lead to differences in lexical meaning and grammatical function.

Information on Hausa (in German) (PDF)

Swahili

Swahili (Kiswahili) is a Bantu language and the most widespread lingua franca in East Africa. Like all Bantu languages, Swahili categorises all nouns into nominal classes. There are fifteen classes in Swahili: six for singular nouns, five for plural nouns, one for infinitives and three for place names.

Information on Swahili (in German) (Department website)

IsiZulu

IsiZulu belongs to the southernmost group of the large family of Niger-Congo languages. It forms part of the Nguni languages to which belong languages such as isiXhosa, isiSwazi and isiNdebele. While these languages have their particularities, they are largely mutually intelligible and together they form the largest linguistic group inside of South Africa. It is the largest South African language by number of speakers, has a wonderfully regular morphology and is probably quite different from most languages you had a chance to learn so far.

Information on IsuZulu (Department website)