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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 ]
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.
Luman is classified as Definitely Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger Lumun (Lomon), also Kuku-Lumun , is a Niger–Congo language in the Talodi family spoken in the Nuba Mountains , Sudan.
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 ]
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 ...
[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.
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.