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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.
This makes Benue–Congo one of the largest subdivisions of the Niger–Congo language family, both in number of languages, of which Ethnologue counts 976 (2017), and in speakers, numbering perhaps 350 million. Benue–Congo also includes a few minor isolates in the Nigeria–Cameroon region, but their exact relationship is uncertain.
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 .
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.
The low number of Defaka speakers, coupled with the fact that other languages dominate the region where Defaka is spoken, edges the language near extinction on a year-to-year basis. It is generally classified in an Ijoid branch of the Niger–Congo family. [3] However, the Ijoid proposal is problematic.
Proto-Niger–Congo is traditionally assumed to have had a disyllabic root structure similar to that of Proto-Bantu, namely (C)V-CVCV [6] (Williamson 2000, [7] etc.). However, Roger Blench (2016) proposes a trisyllabic (CVCVCV) syllabic structure for Proto-Niger–Congo roots, [6] while Konstantin Pozdniakov (2016) suggests that the main prototypical structure of Proto-Niger–Congo roots is ...
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 ]
Adamawa–Ubangi languages often have partial vowel harmony, involving restrictions on the co-occurrence of vowels in a word. As in most branches of the Niger–Congo family, noun class systems are widespread. Adamawa–Ubangi languages are notable for having noun class suffixes rather than prefixes. The noun class system is no longer fully ...