I’m going on a Safari in Africa…do I need to know Swahili?

Wild jungles, beautiful wildlife, exotic tribes, plethora of untouched savannahs, are all images conjured up when one is dreaming about a safari cross-continental adventure.  But which languages are critical to communicate?

If you can speak the language of one of the former colonial nations – English (130 million African speakers), French (115 million African speakers), Portuguese (20 million African speakers) and Spanish (10 million African speakers) – then you can at least get by in some parts of the continent. 

Of the Africans (1,000 million in 2009), about 17 percent speak an Arabic dialect. Around 10 percent speak Swahili in East Africa; about 5 percent speak a Berber dialect; and about 5 percent speak Hausa in West Africa. Other important West African languages are Yoruba, Igbo and Fula. And some important South African languages are Zulu and Afrikaans. [Source: Wikipedia]

The following languages are official at the national level in Africa:

• Arabic in Algeria, Comoros, Chad, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Somalia, Sudan, and Tunisia
• Berber in Morocco and Algeria
• Swahili in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda
• Amharic in Ethiopia
• Somali in Somalia and Djibouti
• Hausa in Nigeria and Niger
• Chichewa in Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique
• Kinyarwanda in Rwanda and the closely related Kirundi in Burundi
• Sango in the CAR
• Swazi in Swaziland and South Africa
• Malagasy in Madagascar
• Seychellois Creole in the Seychelles
• Shona & Ndebele in Zimbabwe
• Afrikaans, Ndebele, Xhosa, Zulu, Pedi, Sotho, Tswana, Swazi, Venda, and Tsonga in South Africa

So in order to get by on a Safari on the African continent, one should speak English, French, Arabic and Swahili (since some if the most beautiful sights can be found in Kenya and Tanzania), and maybe animal languages (ie. lions, tigers - oh my!)

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