Most of the languages of western Africa sought of Sahara are now believed to be related to the vast Bantu family of languages. Bantu is grouped among them in the Niger-Congo family, which is among them the more extensive language family of the world. There are many other languages sandwiched between the Niger-Congo and the Afro-Asiatic languages.
Afrikaans, is one of the 11 official languages of South Africa, or Cape Dutch, is principally derived from the Zuid-Holland dialect of mid- 17th century Dutch settlers in South Africa. It gained loanwords from English, French, and German and from African languages and underwent grammatical simplification.
In The Languages of Africa (1963) the linguists traced the historical origin and development of African languages, and classified them into four major groups: Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan. The largest language group in number of speakers, Niger-Congo, has about 300 million speakers. The second largest group, Afro-Asiatic, has about 200 million, followed by Nilo-Saharan with more than 11 million and Khoisan with about 78,000. In classifying African languages, they compared lists of basic words from a large number of languages. they also compared similarities in the forms and functions of grammatical structures. Languages belonging to the same group share certain basic vocabulary "words known as cognates "and grammatical features that trace back to a common origin. Linguists refer to this shared origin as the protolanguage or the ancestral language.
Austronesian Languages, formerly called Malayo-Polynesian languages, one of the world's largest language families, both in terms of numbers of languages "more than 700 "and geographic spread "covering islands and some mainland areas from Madagascar in the west to Easter Island and Hawaii in the east. The languages of Australia and most of New Guinea, however, are not part of this family.