Portuguese language in Africa The nation-states with Portuguese as an official language in Africa are referred to by the acronym PALOP () and include the following: Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe. Portuguese is a primarily urban language having a reduced presence in rural areas, except for in Angola and São Tomé and Príncipe, where the language is more widespread. South Africa also has approximately 300,000 speakers of Portuguese, primarily settlers from Madeira and white Angolans and Mozambicans who emigrated from 1975 onwards, following the independence of the former colonies. The civil wars in Angola and Mozambique also resulted in
West Africa inhabited by both traditionally West African groups such as the Fulani, Soninke and Wolof, along with Arab-Berber Maghrebi people. Due to its increasingly close ties to the Arab World and its 1999 withdrawal from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), in modern times it is often considered, especially in Africa, as now part of western North Africa. Major cities in West Africa include: West Africa, broadly defined to include the western portion of the Maghreb (Western Sahara, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia), occupies an area in excess of 6,140,000 km, or approximately one-fifth of Africa. The vast majority of