West Atlantic

West Atlantic, also called the Atlantic or North Atlantic languages, is a typological grouping of Niger-Congo languages spoken along the West African coast from Senegal to Liberia, with some members, such as the Fula languages, having spread eastward across the Sahel as far as Nigeria, Cameroon and Sudan. Wolof of Senegal and several Fula languages are its most populous members, with several million speakers each, alongside Serer and the Jola dialect cluster, both also from Senegal. Most Atlantic languages show consonant mutation and Bantu-like noun-class systems, with subject-verb-object word order and a mix of tonal and pitch-accent systems. The languages sit within the Atlantic-Congo branch of Niger-Congo, but their unity as a single valid genealogical group is disputed, and recent scholarship has questioned whether some of the traditional Atlantic groupings reflect real common ancestry.