Languages of Africa

Abstract In Africa, as elsewhere, there has obviously been some diffusion of linguistic features from one family to another (e.g., tones into Afro-Asiatic languages, and clicks from Khoisan languages into a number of Bantu languages). Thus, even though speakers of Hausa are racially quite distinct from most other Afro-Asiatic speakers in that they are Negroid whereas the majority of Afro-Asiatic speakers are not, and even though Hausa has tones which most Afro-Asiatic languages do not, Africanists no longer dispute the classification of Hausa as a member of the Afro-Asiatic language family.