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Diedrich Hermann Westermann was a German missionary, Africanist, and linguist. He substantially extended and revised the work of Carl Meinhof, his teacher, although he rejected some of Meinhof's theories only implicitly. Westermann is seen as one of the founders of modern African linguistics.
Niger–Congo is a hypothetical language family spoken over the majority 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 Kru languages are spoken by the Kru people from the southeast of Liberia to the west of Ivory Coast.
The languages of Africa are divided into several major language families:
The West Atlantic languages of West Africa are a major subgroup of the Niger–Congo languages.
The Kwa languages, often specified as New Kwa, are a proposed but as-yet-undemonstrated family of languages spoken in the south-eastern part of Ivory Coast, across southern Ghana, and in central Togo. The name was introduced 1895 by Gottlob Krause and derives from the word for 'people' (Kwa) in many of these languages, as illustrated by Akan names.
The Luo, are several ethnically and linguistically related Nilo-Semitic ethnic groups that inhabit an area ranging from Egypt and Sudan to South Sudan and Ethiopia, through Northern Uganda and eastern Congo (DRC), into western Kenya, and the Mara Region of Tanzania. Their Luo languages belong to the western branch of the Nilotic language family.
The Mbuti people, or Bambuti, are one of several indigenous pygmy groups in the Congo region of Africa. Their languages are Central Sudanic languages and Bantu languages.
The Kongo people are a Bantu ethnic group primarily defined as the speakers of Kikongo. Subgroups include the Beembe, Bwende, Vili, Sundi, Yombe, Dondo, Lari, and others.
The Gbe languages form a cluster of about twenty related languages stretching across the area between eastern Ghana and western Nigeria. The total number of speakers of Gbe languages is between four and eight million. The most widely spoken Gbe language is Ewe, followed by Fon. The Gbe languages were traditionally placed in the Kwa branch of the Niger–Congo languages, but more recently have been classified as Volta–Niger languages. They include five major dialect clusters: Ewe, Fon, Aja, Gen (Mina), and Phla–Pherá.
The Bua languages are a subgroup of the Mbum–Day subgroup of the Savanna languages spoken by fewer than 30,000 people in southern Chad in an area stretching roughly between the Chari River and the Guéra Massif. They were labeled "G13" in Joseph Greenberg's Adamawa language-family proposal. They are ultimately part of the Niger–Congo family, and have exerted a significant influence on Laal.
Logba is a Kwa language spoken in the south-eastern Ghana by approximately 7,500 people. The Logba people call themselves and their language Ikpana, which means ‘defenders of truth’. Logba is different from Lukpa of Togo and Benin, which is also sometimes referred to as Logba.
In early 20th century classification of African languages, Sudanic was a generic term for languages spoken in the Sahel belt, from Ethiopia in the east to Senegal in the west.
The Chokwe people, known by many other names, are an ethnic group of Central and Southern Africa. They are found primarily in Angola, southwestern parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and northwestern parts of Zambia.
The Ekoid languages are a dialect cluster of Southern Bantoid languages spoken principally in southeastern Nigeria and in adjacent regions of Cameroon. They have long been associated with the Bantu languages, without their status being precisely defined. Crabb (1969) remains the major monograph on these languages, although regrettably, Part II, which was to contain grammatical analyses, was never published. Crabb also reviews the literature on Ekoid up to the date of publication.
The Jukunoid languages are a branch of the Benue-Congo languages spoken by the Jukun and related peoples of Nigeria and Cameroon. They are distributed mostly throughout Taraba State, Nigeria and surrounding regions.
The Twa are a group of indigenous African Pygmy tribes.
The Mangbetu–Asoa or Mangbetu languages of the Central Sudanic language family are a cluster of closely related languages spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The Bantu peoples, or Bantu, are an ethnolinguistic grouping of approximately 400 distinct ethnic groups who speak Bantu languages. They are native to 24 countries spread over a vast area from Central Africa to Southeast Africa and into Southern Africa. There are several hundred Bantu languages. Depending on the definition of "language" or "dialect", it is estimated that there are between 440 and 680 distinct languages. The total number of speakers is in the hundreds of millions, ranging at roughly 350 million in the mid-2010s. About 60 million speakers (2015), divided into some 200 ethnic or tribal groups, are found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone.
The African Pygmies are a group of ethnicities native to Central Africa, mostly the Congo Basin, traditionally subsisting on a forager and hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They are divided into three roughly geographic groups:
References
- ↑ Kuk at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
- ↑ Good, Jeff. 2021. Individual-level lexical variation in the Bantu homeland and its implications for the development of Benue-Congo . Diedrich Westermann-Workshop (West-central African linguistic history between Macro-Sudan Belt and Niger-Congo: commemorating Diedrich Westermann’s legacy and the 100th anniversary of the Berlin professorship for African languages), 4-6 November 2021, Humboldt University of Berlin.
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