Language Family

Niger-Congo

NY-jer KONG-goh

Also Known As Niger-Kordofanian Joseph Greenberg renamed of the family (first Congo-Kordofanian, then Niger-Kordofanian) after coordinating Kordofanian alongside Niger-Congo; later scholarship repositioned Kordofanian as one branch among several, and the simpler Niger-Congo name is current again.

African Language Families

Niger-Congo is, by number of languages, the largest language family in the world, encompassing well over a thousand languages across sub-Saharan Africa, including the Bantu languages that alone account for several hundred of them and roughly a third of the continent's population. Its unifying features include noun class systems and, in many branches, agglutinative verb morphology. Kordofanian and Mande, both proposed as Niger-Congo branches, are the family's most contested members; some comparativists treat one or both as independent families related to Niger-Congo only distantly, if at all.

Facts

Disputed

Proto-Language Status

No Proto-Niger-Congo has been securely reconstructed, and the genealogical unity of Niger-Congo as a single family, rather than a geographic grouping of related but separately descended families, remains an open question in historical linguistics. 3

Niger-Congo unity itself, as opposed to a looser areal grouping of several distinct large families such as Atlantic-Congo, is disputed among historical linguists; this atlas follows the broader traditional grouping while naming the dispute.

Region

Sub-Saharan Africa 1

Speaker Count

500,000,000 2

Aggregate across the Niger-Congo languages; mid-2020s estimate.

Niger-Congo

2 entries

Status

Speaker Count Band

Script Used

Period Start Year

Language Kind

Official Status

Swahili

Niger-Congo

Yoruba

Niger-Congo

FAQs

What holds the core of the Niger-Congo languages together as a family?

Regular sound correspondences in vocabulary, with noun classes and verbal extensions as less systematic evidence.

Glottolog, which classifies the related Atlantic-Congo grouping, says its core is held together by regular sound correspondences in lexical items between the languages of its subfamilies. Verbal extensions and noun class systems point the same way, but less systematically. That is why the unity of the wider Niger-Congo family is still debated, especially for contested members such as Mande and Kordofanian.

Connections

Ancestor Of

Atlantic-Congo

Atlantic-Congo is the largest primary branch of Niger-Congo, containing the great majority of the family's languages including Bantu.

Bantu

Bantu is classified within the Southern Bantoid group of Benue-Congo, itself a major branch of the Volta-Congo classification inside Niger-Congo.

Source Glottolog

Gur

Source Wikipedia: Gur Languages

Ijoid

Ijoid is generally treated as an early-branching primary division of Niger-Congo, coordinate with Atlantic-Congo and Mande.

Mande

Mande is generally treated as an early-branching primary division of Niger-Congo, coordinate with Atlantic-Congo and Ijoid.

Associated With

Joseph Greenberg

Niger-Congo is one of the four African language families Greenberg proposed in The Languages of Africa (1963).

Source Wikipedia: Joseph Greenberg

Includes

Swahili

Source The Cambridge Encyclopedia of LanguageDavid Crystal (editor)

Yoruba

Source Wikipedia: Yoruba Language

In the Other Atlases