More than 95% of the people in sub-Saharan Africa speak languages of the Niger-Congo family, which contains 6 branches of hard-to-classify languages. The largest branch is Benue-Congo. It includes three languages used as the first languages by at least 10 million people. Then there is Swahili, which is the first language of 800,000 people and only an official language in Tanzania, but it’s used by an estimated 30 million Africans as a second language.
Just for kicks: Here is a translator. Use it to translate English to Swahili and see what it’s like.
The other 5% of the population speak languages of Khoisan or Nilo-Saharan families.
