African Studies Center

University of Pennsylvania

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K-12 Internet Resources on Africa

African Languages

This section includes information about the spoken languages of Africa, as well as linguistic analysis of some African languages.

Afrikaans
Afrikaans is the home language of about 7 million people, mostly in South Africa and Namibia. It belongs to the family of Germanic languages. It is part of the West Germanic subgroup and is, in fact, its newest member. Afrikaans is closely related to Dutch, and has been influenced by French, English and Malay.

Arabic- Virtual Language Lab (Roger Allen)
The University of Pennsylvania's pioneering role in the implementation of proficiency-based instruction and testing has made its Arabic program one of the most prominent Arabic programs in the country. This site contains Arabic Audio Lessons, and Arabic Music, Films & Pictures.

Yamada Web Guide to Amharic
Resources on Amharic's morphology, teaching reources an poetry.

Dogon Dictionary
Dogon is a group of languages in the Niger-Congo language family (roughly analogous to the Romance languages in Indo-European), spoken in Mali and Burkina Faso.

Hausa Online Grammar
This online grammar provides basic information about the structure of the Hausa language explained in a relatively non-technical way.

Luganda
Luganda, the native language of the people of Buganda in Uganda, developed over the centuries as a spoken language. Its written form is only as recent as the arrival of the Arab and European influence among the Baganda.

Nyakyusa Dictionary
Nyakyusa is one of the relatively few Bantu languages that doesn't make use of tones, but it also differs substantially from surrounding languages in terms of vocabulary.

Kiswahili Home Page (Kassim Abdullah)
Introductory Kiswahili Lessons. Kiswahili is an African language spoken mainly by the people of eastern and central Africa.

Noun Classification in Swahili (Ellen Contini-Morava)
This is a report on research in progress on the semantics and syntax of noun classes in Swahili.

Swahili Dictionary
This is the Internet Living Swahili Dictionary Project known as Kamusi. The dictionary contains 29 work packs, each about 100 words, available for discussion and review.

Archives of Popular Swahili
Archives of Popular Swahili is an electronic archive of spoken and written Popular Swahili texts. Popular varieties of Swahili are used as the primary medium or vehicle of Central-African popular culture.

Kiswahili Language and Culture
Extensive language resources on Swahili from University of Oregon.

Somali Language
Resources on Somali language and Literature.

Twi Language
Resources on Twi language and Literature.

Wolof On-Line
Resouces on Wolof: audio samples, conversation, links and Wolof Course.

Yoruba Language
Resources on Yoruba language and Literature.

Zulu Language
Resources on Zulu language and Literature.

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