ABSTRACT
The principal Semitic language in Africa is Arabic, which came in with the Muhammadan conquerors in the seventh century, and is now spoken throughout Egypt and North Africa, though it has not quite displaced the native Hamitic speech in Algeria and Morocco. The Semitic languages are very fully inflected—by prefixes, suffixes, and vowel-changes in the body of the word. Their outstanding feature, distinguishing them sharply from the Hamitic family, is the existence of the triliteral roots which play so large a part in Hebrew and Arabic grammar. European missionaries—usually the first to reduce a language to writing—have introduced the Roman alphabet into their schools, adapting it as well as they could to the sounds of native speech. The Arabic writing, imported into Africa by the early conquerors and colonists, was long ago brought into use for both Swahili and Hausa; but the great mass of African speech has, remained unwritten and been transmitted by word of mouth only.
