#CONJI LANGUAGEST SERIAL#

It consists of 1,436 languages and dialects spread over a relatively small geographic area (Grimes 64). The Niger-Congo Language family represents one of the largest groups of languages in the world. Cambridge University Press (1968).Exploring the Niger-Congo Languages Exploring the Niger-Congo Languages A Phonetic Study of West African Languages. The Niger-Congo Languages: A Classification and Description of Africa’s Largest Language Family. © 2013 Alejandro Gutman and Beatriz Avanzati In them, two or more verbs, having the same subject, tense and mood, stand next to each other without a conjunction.

#CONJI LANGUAGEST SERIAL#

Serial verb constructions are frequent in Niger-Congo. Some classes are semantic (humans, animals, plants, parts of the body), others are based on grammatical categories (infinitives, locatives, diminutives) but many are heterogeneous.

For instance, Proto-Bantu had 19 noun classes, Atlantic languages have from 3 to 25, and Gur languages usually 11. The number of noun classes varies greatly from language to language. Most noun class systems have an accompanying concord system: other elements of the noun phrase (such as determiners, adjectives, or quantifiers), and frequently the verbs as well, are marked by an affix selected according to the class of the noun. All members of a given class share the same affix. Nouns are grouped in different classes, marked by prefixes, suffixes or both. The system of noun classes is probably the characteristic most widely found in Niger-Congo languages (though Mande doesn't have them). Tones serve to make lexical and grammatical distinctions. Usually, they have two or three tones but in some languages four or five. Most Niger-Congo languages have tones though some of the most important, like Swahili and Fula, do not.

In it, there is a contrast between vowels pronounced with an advanced tongue root (+ATR) and a retracted tongue root (-ATR): only vowels from the +ATR set or from the -ATR set appear in the same morpheme. The northern group of the Atlantic branch and the non-Bantu languages of Benue-Congo exhibit ATR vowel harmony. Kongo was also the choice for the first grammar of the phylum, written in 1659. The first book in a Niger-Congo language was a catechism in Kongo, a Bantu language, published in 1624. The earliest attestation of Niger-Congo words are found in Portuguese documents of the 16th century and in a work of an Italian mathematician from the same period. Note: The total number of Swahili speakers, including first and second language speakers amount to 50-100 million. For each of the nine families and the unclassified Dogon the approximate number of speakers (in millions) is: More than 600 million people speak a Niger-Congo language, 330 million of which speak one of the Bantu group. I) Kordofanian languages are geographically separated from the other Niger-Congo languages and confined to the mountains of central Sudan. H) Ijoid, located in the Niger Delta, includes Defaka and the Ijo cluster. Of the Bantu languages the most numerous are Swahili, Rwanda, Shona and Zulu. The main Non-Bantoid languages are the Nigerian Yoruba and Igbo. It is divided between Non-Bantoid and Bantoid, the latter itself divided into the Non-Bantu languages of central Cameroon and eastern Nigeria, and the Bantu languages that spread across the entire southern half of the continent. G) Benue-Congo is, by far, the largest family. į) Adamawa-Ubangi, spoken in Cameroon, southern Chad and the Central African Republic, includes Gbaya, Banda and Zande. Į) The Kwa family, in the southern regions of Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo and Benin, includes Baule, Aka n and Ewe. Ĭ) Kru languages are spoken in the forest regions of southern Liberia and south-west Ivory Coast.ĭ) The largest of the Gur or Voltaic languages, spoken mainly in Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo and Benin, is Moore. It includes, among others, Wolof and Fula which extends inland into de savannas up to Sudan.ī) The best known Mande languages, spoken in western Africa, are Bambara, Dyula, Malinke, Mandinka (Mande), West and East Maninkakan. A) Atlantic, the westernmost branch of the Niger-Congo, is spoken along the Atlantic Coast.

Conji languagest