Languages Of Africa. The languages of Africa fall into five groups: 1. The Semitic idioms of Abyssinia, exhibiting special relations with the Himyaritic of southwestern Arabia, from which region the Abyssinians are unquestionably immigrants, across the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb. One of these idioms, the Ethi-opic or Crcez, was long a language of literary cultivation, under Christian influence, and possesses a considerable body of literature. More recently, the Amharic, a kindred dialect, has been the official and learned language of the country. 2. The Egyptian and the dialects related with it. Between these and the Semitic there are generally held to exist evidences of an ultimate but exceedingly distant connection. The Berber language (descendant of the ancient Libyan), occupying, except so far as it has been displaced by the Arabic, the whole north of the continent, and a group of dialects south of Abyssinia, of which the Galla is the most prominent member, are the other relatives of the Egyptian. 3. The Hottentot and Bushman dialects, in the extreme south.

Bleek has within a few years declared that these are branches of the Egyptian group, and that those degraded communities, almost the lowest and most savage of men, are therefore a fragment from the same stock which produced the culture of Egypt; and many linguistic and ethnological writers have accepted his view, but the most recent authorities reject it. 4. The South African group or family, sometimes called the Caffre, or Zingian, or Bantu. This fills the whole southern part of the continent (except the territory of the preceding group), and is made up of a considerable number and variety of dialects - the Zulu, Sechuana, Suaheli, Mpongwe, etc. - all plainly and closely related. Its most striking peculiarity is its prevailing use of prefixes instead of suffixes; a word without a formative prefix is as rare here as in the older languages of our own family one without a suffix; and the grammatical agreement of words is in their prefixes, or alliterative, instead of in their suffixes, or rhyming.

A phonetic peculiarity shared by some of the dialects of this group with those of the preceding is their use of clicks, or sounds made with the tongue by suction, as consonants composing words. 5. There remains a broad band across the middle of the continent, filled with a large number of widely diverse languages - so diverse that between them, for the most part, no connections can be clearly traced; although, as sharing to a certain degree the peculiarity of formation by prefixes with the South African family, they are probably ultimately related with the latter and with one another. Conspicuous among them are the Bornoo, Haussa, Mandingo, Grebo, Yoruban, and Foolah.