Niger-Congo languages Niger-Congo languages The (West) Atlantic languages of West Africa are a subgroup of Niger-Congo language family. These languages are generally spoken along the Atlantic coast from Senegal to Liberia, though nomadic Fula speakers have spread eastward and are found in significant concentrations across the Sahel, from Senegal to Nigeria and Cameroon. Fula and the Wolof language of Senegal are the largest Atlantic languages with several million speakers each; other significant members include Serer and the Jola dialect cluster of Senegal and Temne in Sierra Leone. Many Atlantic languages exhibit consonant mutation, and most have a noun class system similar to that in the distantly related Bantu languages. Some members are tonal, while others have pitch accent systems. The basic word order tends to be SVO. ...more on Wikipedia about "Atlantic languages"
The town of Bafut is a town in Cameroon in the Northwest Province, to the North of the city of Bamenda. It is the headquarters of the Bafut subdivision. It is famous for ...more on Wikipedia about "Bafut"
The Bung language is a nearly extinct language of Cameroon spoken by 3 people (in 1995) at the village of Boung on the Adamawa Plateau. A wordlist collected for it shows its strongest resemblance to be with the Ndung dialect of Kwanja, although that may simply be because this has become the village's dominant language. It also has words in common with Tep, Somyev, and Vute, while a number of words' origins remain unclear (possibly Adamawan). For lack of data, it is not definitively classified. ...more on Wikipedia about "Bung language"
The Dogon languages are spoken by the Dogon in Mali. There are about 600,000 speakers with at least 15 varieties, some of them mutually unintelligible. They are tonal languages with two tones. They are Subject Object Verb languages. ...more on Wikipedia about "Dogon languages"
The Ijoid languages are spoken by the Ijaw (Izon, Ijo) and the Defaka (Afakani) in the Niger Delta in Nigeria, totalling about 1.7 million. They form a separate branch of the Niger-Congo languages and are noted for their Subject Object Verb basic word order, which is an unusual feature in the Niger-Congo family shared only by such distant branches as Mande and Dogon. The largest Ijoid language by number of speakers is Izon (1 million), followed at a distance by Kalabari with about 250,000 speakers. Ijoid is generally divided in two branches, Ijo and Defaka. The Ijo branch consists of the about nine Ijo languages. Defaka, a tiny endangered language of the Bonny area, forms a branch on its own. The following classification is based on Jenewari (1989) and Williamson & Blench (2000). ...more on Wikipedia about "Ijoid languages"
The Mande languages are spoken in several countries in West Africa by the Mandé people and include Mandinka, Soninke, Bambara, Dioula, Kagoro, Bozo, Mendé, Yacouba, and Vai. The population includes millions of speakers, chiefly in Gambia, Senegal and Mali. This linguistic group is a divergent branch of the Niger-Congo family. ...more on Wikipedia about "Mande languages"
The Niger-Congo languages constitute one of the world's major language families, and Africa's largest in terms of geographical area, number of speakers, and number of distinct languages. They may constitute the world's largest language family in terms of distinct languages, although this question is complicated by ambiguity in what is a distinct language. Almost all of the most widely spoken indigenous languages of Subsaharan Africa belong to this group. A common property of many Niger-Congo languages is the use of a noun class system. ...more on Wikipedia about "Niger-Congo languages"
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In early twentieth century classification of African languages, Sudanic languages was a generic term for African languages spoken in the Sahel belt from Ethiopia in the east to Senegal in the west. The grouping was based on geographic and loose typological grounds, and included many languages now classified as Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo. One of its proponents was the German linguist Carl Meinhof. Meinhof had been working on the Bantu languages, which have a elaborate noun class system, and he labeled all languages that lacked such a noun class system Sudansprachen. ...more on Wikipedia about "Sudanic languages"
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