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This is a list of English language words that come from the Niger-Congo languages. It excludes placenames except where they have become common words. This list is incomplete ; you can help by adding missing items .
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.
The Mande languages show a few lexical similarities with the Atlantic–Congo language family, so together they have been proposed as parts of a larger Niger–Congo language family since the 1950s. However, the Mande languages lack the noun-class morphology that is the primary identifying feature of the Atlantic–Congo languages.
Northwest Bantu is more divergent internally than Central Bantu, and perhaps less conservative due to contact with non-Bantu Niger–Congo languages; Central Bantu is likely the innovative line cladistically. Northwest Bantu is not a coherent family, but even for Central Bantu the evidence is lexical, with little evidence that it is a ...
Igbo affixes to English verbs determine tense and aspectual markers, such as the Igbo suffix -i affixed to the English word 'check', expressed as the word check-i. [ 43 ] The standardized Igbo language is composed of fragmented features from numerous Igbo dialects and is not technically a spoken language, but it is used in communicational ...
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 ...
The Atlantic–Congo languages make up the largest demonstrated family of languages in Africa. They have characteristic noun class systems and form the core of the Niger–Congo family hypothesis. They comprise all of Niger–Congo apart from Mande , Dogon , Ijoid , Siamou , Kru , the Katla and Rashad languages (previously classified as ...
The Ijo languages were traditionally considered a distinct branch of the Niger–Congo family (perhaps along with Defaka in a group called Ijoid). [3] They are notable for their subject–object–verb basic word order, which is otherwise an unusual feature in Niger–Congo, shared only by such distant potential branches as Mande and Dogon.