African Language Families

A language family whose living or historical member languages are documented as native to the African continent: West Africa's Niger-Congo and Mande families, the Nilo-Saharan and Afro-Asiatic phyla stretching from the Sahara to the Horn of Africa, the Khoisan click-language families of southern Africa, and English-based Creole, whose sole live member recorded in this atlas's own graph, Nigerian Pidgin, is a West African contact language. Belongs here: any language-family entity whose constituent languages are documented as natively spoken predominantly within Africa. Does not belong here: Semitic, whose own historical and demographic core is the Middle East and which this atlas groups under Eurasian Language Families even though some Semitic languages, such as Amharic and Tigrinya, are spoken in the Horn of Africa; a family belongs to the region of its documented core, not every region any branch happens to reach.