Jody Rush, age 16, of Greenville, Miss., for her question:

IS THERE AN AFRICAN LANGUAGE?

There is no single African language because more than 1,000 different languages are spoken in Africa. Apart from Arabic, which is not confined to Africa, the most widely spoken African tongues are Swahili and Hausa, each with more than 10 million speakers.

Several languages (often inaccurately termed dialects simply because they have few users) are spoken by only a few thousand people. On the average an African language has about 200,000 speakers. Only a few dozen languages have written literatures, the majority have long standing traditions of oral literature.

According to the most recent and widely accepted scholarly practice, the languages of Africa are grouped into four language families: Hamito Semit (or Afro Asiatic), Nilo Saharan, Khoisan and Niger Kordofanian.

A language family is a group of related languages presumably derived from a common origin. A family is often subdivided into branches composed of more closely related languages. At least some of the African linguistic families are believed to have a history of more than 5,000 years.

African languages that belong to different families are as little alike as English, Turkish, Chinese and Navajo, although the disparate tongues may be spoken in the same locality. Even within a single family, African languages may be as different in sound and structure as English, Italian, Russian and Hindi, all of which are members of the Indo European language family. Within a given branch of one family, however, languages may often be as closely related as German, Dutch and Swedish.

Writing systems exist for only about half the languages of Africa and in certain tongues the only written literature is a translation of some portion of the New testament.

Except for Arabic and certain languages of Ethiopia, the alphabets of most African languages are based on adaptations of the Roman alphabet and were introduced by missionaries. A few tribes, notably the Vat in Liberia and the Bamum in Cameroon, have developed their own syllabic writing systems.

The first European students of African languages were usually missionaries who, more than other groups, were interested in learning to speak with native populations and preparing literature for them. Much of the available information on African languages still comes from missionary sources.

It is often suggested that the indigenous languages of Africa will eventually give way to internationally important European languages, or at least to a few of the major languages native to Africa. Despite an increasing number of African contacts with Europe and the United States, however, most African languages are expected to be in use over the next few centuries.