Languages in Kenya

The languages in Kenya are beyond imagination, they are more than fifty languages is that reasonable?

If we want to talk about the languages in Kenya we will be amazed at the sheer amount of information. According to Ethnologue, there are a total of 70 languages in Kenya. This variety is a reflection of the country’s diverse population which includes most major Ethnoracial and linguistic groups found in Africa (see Languages of Africa).

Languages in Kenya spoken locally belong to three broad language families: Niger-Congo (Bantu branch) and Nilo-Saharan (Nilotic branch), spoken by the country’s Bantu, Nilotic populations, and the Cushitic, Afroasiatic language families respectively. The Arab ethnic minority speaks languages belonging to the separate Afroasiatic family, with the Hindustani and British residents speaking languages from the Indo-European family.

Within their own communities, Kenya’s diverse ethnic groups usually speak their mother languages. for contact with foreign communities, the two official languages, English and Swahili, are utilized with varied degrees of fluency.

British English is largely additionally a different local dialect, Kenyan English, spoken by some groups and individuals in the nation and incorporates elements unique to it that was formed from local Bantu languages like Kiswahili and Kikuyu. It has evolved since colonization and incorporates features of American English. English is widely used in business, education, and government. Peri-urban and rural residents are less multilingual, with many speaking solely their native languages in rural regions.

The official languages in Kenya

Kenya is home to approximately forty ethnic groups, and while English and Swahili are the two official languages of the country, there are several regional and ethnic languages, with the following being the most widely spoken:

• Swahili is one of the two officially recognized languages. In the country, it is also recognized as one of the official languages ​​of the African Union, and Kiswahili is used by most of the population of Kenya, although it is the language of the Swahili ethnicity that lives in the east along the coast.
• English is the other official language in Kenya, which began to be used after the colonization of Kenya by Britain in the nineteenth century. Today, English is used in official conversations and the issuance of various government documents. It is also used as a common language among most urban residents. The government educational system teaches all The materials in English, in addition to adopting it as the main media language.
• Kikuyu (in English: Kikuyu) The Kikuyu ethnicity inhabits the central region of Kenya, and it is the mother tongue of that ethnic group, which is estimated to number about seven million people, whose proportion is close to a quarter of the population in the country, so that language is considered one of the main local languages, and it includes four dialects distributed over the geographical regions of the country.
• Luhya (in English: Luhya) is the local language of the western region of Kenya, and it is the language of the ethnic group of the same name, and the number of its speakers is estimated at more than one million and two hundred thousand people, and it is divided into six main dialects