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Niger–Congo is a hypothetical language family spoken over the majority of sub-Saharan Africa. [1] It unites the Mande languages, the Atlantic–Congo languages (which share a characteristic noun class system), and possibly several smaller groups of languages that are difficult to classify.
An endangered language is a language that it is at risk of falling out of use, generally because it has few surviving speakers. If it loses all of its native people, it becomes an extinct language . UNESCO defines four levels of language endangerment between "safe" (not endangered) and "extinct": [ 1 ]
The Niger–Congo languages constitute the largest language family spoken in West Africa and perhaps the world in terms of the number of languages. [ citation needed ] One of its salient features is an elaborate noun class system with grammatical concord .
Pages in category "Endangered Niger–Congo languages" The following 25 pages are in this category, out of 25 total. This list may not reflect recent changes. A.
Lists of endangered languages are mainly based on the definitions used by UNESCO. In order to be listed, a language must be classified as "endangered" in a cited academic source. Researchers have concluded that in less than one hundred years, almost half of the languages known today will be lost forever. [1] The lists are organized by region.
[4] [5] Because of that, the language also goes by the name Eliri. According to the UNESCO “Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger” from 2010, the language is critically endangered. [ 2 ] However, the 2020 edition of "Ethnoloɠue" describes it as endangered, counting 400 speakers among some young people and all adults.
Today, the Kadu languages are excluded, and the others are usually included in Niger–Congo proper. [ 2 ] Roger Blench notes that the Talodi and Heiban families have the noun class systems characteristic of the Atlantic–Congo core of Niger–Congo but that the two Katla languages have no trace of ever having had such a system.
The Dogon languages show very few remnants of the noun class system characteristic of much of Niger–Congo, leading linguists to conclude that they likely diverged from Niger–Congo very early. [citation needed] Roger Blench comments, [1] Dogon is both lexically and structurally very different from most other [Niger–Congo] families.