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Niger-Congo is a hypothetical language family spoken over nearly the entirety of sub-Saharan Africa. It unites the Mande languages, the Atlantic-Congo languages, and possibly several smaller groups of languages that are difficult to classify. If valid, Niger-Congo would be the world's largest in terms of member languages, the third-largest in terms of speakers, and Africa's largest in terms of geographical area. It is generally considered to be the world's largest language family in terms of the number of distinct languages, just ahead of Austronesian, although this is complicated by the ambiguity about what constitutes a distinct language; the number of named Niger-Congo languages listed by Ethnologue is 1,540.
The West Atlantic languages of West Africa are a major subgroup of the Niger–Congo languages.
The Cangin languages[ˈtʃaŋin] are spoken by 200,000 people in a small area east of Dakar, Senegal. They are the languages spoken by the Serer people who do not speak the Serer language (Serer-Sine). Because the people are ethnically Serer, the Cangin languages are commonly thought to be dialects of the Serer language. However, they are not closely related; Serer is closer to Fulani than it is to Cangin.
The Mande languages are spoken in several countries in West Africa by the Mandé peoples and include Maninka, Mandinka, Soninke, Bambara, Kpelle, Dioula, Bozo, Mende, Susu, and Vai. There are "60 to 75 languages spoken by 30 to 40 million people", chiefly in Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ivory Coast, and also in northwestern Nigeria and northern Benin.
The Bissagos Islands, also spelled Bijagós, are a group of about 88 islands and islets located in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Guinea-Bissau. The archipelago was formed from the ancient delta of the Geba and Grande de Buba rivers and spans an area of 12,958 km2 (5,003 sq mi). 20 of its islands are populated year-round, including the most populated island, Bubaque, where the administrative capital is situated.
This is a list of different language classification proposals developed for the indigenous languages of the Americas. The article is divided into North, Central, and South America sections; however, the classifications do not correspond to these divisions.
Serer, often broken into differing regional dialects such as Serer-Sine and Serer saloum, is a language of the Senegambian branch of Niger–Congo spoken by 1.2 million people in Senegal and 30,000 in the Gambia as of 2009. It is the principal language of the Serer people.
Jola (Joola) or Diola is a dialect continuum spoken in Senegal, the Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau. It belongs to the Bak branch of the Niger–Congo language family.
The Pauwasi languages are a likely family of Papuan languages, mostly in Indonesia. The subfamilies are at best only distantly related. The best described Pauwasi language is Karkar, across the border in Papua New Guinea. They are spoken around the headwaters of the Pauwasi River in the Indonesian-PNG border region.
The Mel languages are a branch of Niger–Congo languages spoken in Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. The most populous is Temne, with about two million speakers; Kissi is next, with half a million.
The Senegambian languages, traditionally known as the Northern West Atlantic, or in more recent literature sometimes confusingly as the Atlantic languages, are a branch of Atlantic–Congo languages centered on Senegal, with most languages spoken there and in neighboring southern Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau, and Guinea. The transhumant Fula, however, have spread with their languages from Senegal across the western and central Sahel. The most populous unitary language is Wolof, the national language of Senegal, with four million native speakers and millions more second-language users. There are perhaps 13 million speakers of the various varieties of Fula, and over a million speakers of Serer. The most prominent feature of the Senegambian languages is that they are devoid of tone, unlike the vast majority of Atlantic-Congo languages.
Bijago or Bidyogo is the language of the Bissagos Archipelago of Guinea-Bissau. There are some difficulties of grammar and intelligibility between dialects, with the Kamona dialect being unintelligible to the others.
The Limba language, Hulimba, is a Niger-Congo language of Sierra Leone and Guinea. It is not closely related to other languages and appears to form its own branch of the Niger–Congo family, although it was formerly classified as an Atlantic language. Dialects include Tonko, Sela, Kamuke, Wara-wara, Keleng, Biriwa, and Safroko. The eastern variety, spoken primarily in Guinea, is quite distinct. Limba has a system of noun classes, marked by an old, eroded set of prefixes augmented by a newer set of enclitics.
Sua, also known by other ethnic groups as Mansoanka or Kunante, is a divergent Niger–Congo language spoken in the Mansôa area of Guinea-Bissau.
Mawes is a Papuan language of Indonesia.
Gola is a language of Liberia and Sierra Leone. It was traditionally classified as an Atlantic language, but this is no longer accepted in more recent studies.
The Serer-Laalaa or Laalaa are part of the Serer ethnic group of Senegambia. They live in Laa, the Léhar Region, which comprises eighteen villages north of Thies and whose inhabitants are Serer-Laalaa. Although the people are ethnically Serer, their language Laalaa is not a dialect of the Serer-Sine language, but—like Saafi, Noon, Ndut and Palor, one of the Cangin languages.
The Serer-Noon also called Noon are an ethnic people who occupy western Senegal. They are part of the Serer people though they do not speak the Serer-Sine language natively.
Bandial (Banjaal), or Eegima (Eegimaa), is a Jola language of the Casamance region of Senegal. The three dialects, Affiniam, Bandial proper, and Elun are divergent, on the border between dialects and distinct languages.
Konstantin Igorevich Pozdniakov is a Russian-French linguist who works on the comparative-historical linguistics of the Mande, Atlantic, and Niger-Congo families. He also works on Rongorongo of Easter Island.
References
- 1 2 Wilson, William André Auquier. 2007. Guinea Languages of the Atlantic group: description and internal classification. (Schriften zur Afrikanistik, 12.) Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
- ↑ Sapir, David (1971). "West Atlantic: An inventory of the languages, their noun class systems and consonant alternations." Current Trends in Linguistics 7:45-112. The Hague: Mouton.
- ↑ Segerer, Guillaume. 2010a. ‘Isolates’ in ‘Atlantic’. Paper presented at the International Workshop “Language Isolates in Africa,” Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage (DDL) Lyon, 3‒4 December.
- ↑ Segerer, Guillaume. 2010b. The Atlantic languages: State of the art. Paper presented at the International Workshop “Genealogical language classification in Africa beyond Greenberg,” Humboldt University Berlin, 21‒22 February. (accessed 30 March 2017).