Niger-Congo Languages

Niger-Congo Languages, great phylum containing over 1,400 languages, more than any other phylum in the world, spoken by close to 400 million speakers, and divided into a number of families in central, southern, and western Africa. As currently understood, these include Kordofanian, a small, more distantly related family of about 30 languages (some under threat) spoken in the Nuba hills of the Kordofan area in central Sudan, in addition to most of the sub-Saharan languages of western, central, and southern Africa, belonging to families such as Atlantic, Mande, Gur (Voltaic), Kru, Kwa, Benue-Congo, Ijoid, and Adamawa-Ubangi. Some linguists have suggested that Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan should be conjoined into a single (Congo-Saharan) super-phylum.

Atlantic languages are spoken along the Atlantic coastline of West Africa and include all varieties of Fulani (Fulfulde) (13 million speakers in mainly Sahel areas), and Wolof (3.6 million in Senegal). The Mande language family is spread over western areas of West Africa and includes Bambara (3 million; Mali, Senegal, and Côte d’Ivoire), and Mende (1.5 million; Sierra Leone and Liberia), though its membership of Niger-Congo is disputed by some. Kwa languages are spoken along the coast between Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria, and Akan (Twi) (8.3 million speakers in Ghana) and Ewe (3.1 million in Ghana and Togo) are two of the more prominent.

The vast Benue-Congo family stretches from southern Nigeria eastwards and southwards into the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. The widest-spoken languages are Yoruba (19.3 million; Nigeria and Benin), and Igbo (Ibo) (18 million; Nigeria). The widespread Bantu branch of Benue-Congo covers much of the southern half of the continent (the term bantu means “(the) people” in many of the languages). This spread is the outcome of the pre-historic expansion of agricultural Bantu peoples from West Africa (mainly southern Cameroon/Nigeria) about 3,000 years ago (aided by the use of iron from around 500 bc), a movement that resulted in the displacement of indigenous Central African Pygmy languages.

The genetic unity of the Bantu sub-family has been recognized for more than a century, and some of the better known Bantu languages are Bemba (3.3 million; Zambia), Ganda (Luganda) (3 million; Uganda), Kikuyu (5.3 million; Kenya), Kinyarwanda (7.3 million; Rwanda and Uganda), Kongo (1 million; Democratic Republic of the Congo [DRC]), Lingala (7 million; DRC and Republic of the Congo), Shona (10.6 million; Zimbabwe), Swahili (772,642 first-language speakers, and 30 million second-language users in Tanzania, Kenya, and East Africa as a lingua franca), Xhosa (7.2 million; South Africa), and Zulu (9.2 million; South Africa). A variety of Swahili (Comorian) is also used on the Comoros islands and the island of Madagascar; otherwise the major language spoken there is the genetically non-African Malagasy, belonging to the Western Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family.

Niger-Congo languages (especially Bantu) are well known for their complex system of noun classification which marks singular/plural pairs with affixes (so-called “noun class systems”), often with agreement on other elements in the sentence. The semantic classification and marking typically distinguish humans, animals, plants, mass nouns, and liquids. Subject-verb-object basic word order is common throughout Niger-Congo (with subject-object-verb prevalent in some groups). See also African Languages; Parts of Speech.

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.