Niger-Congo languages

Niger-Congo languages, a family of languages of Africa, which in terms of the number of languages spoken, their geographic extent, and the number of speakers is by far the largest language family in Africa. The area in which these languages are spoken stretches from Dakar, Senegal, at the westernmost tip of the continent, east to Mombasa in Kenya and south to Cape Town, South Africa. Excluding northern Africa (Mauritania to Egypt and Sudan) and the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia to Somalia), some 85 percent of the population of Africa—at least 600 million people—speak a Niger-Congo language. In two countries, Niger and Chad, Niger-Congo languages are spoken by a minority. In northern Nigeria, northern Uganda, and Kenya there are substantial populations speaking other languages, but even in these countries the majority of the population speaks a Niger-Congo language.

The latest estimation of the number of Niger-Congo languages is about 1,400. All of these are considered to be distinct languages and not simply dialects. The named dialects of these languages number many thousands more, not to mention the variant names for those languages and dialects. For example, Swahili alone has 17 separate dialects and 15 additional variant names for some of the dialects.

With such a huge language family spread so widely across a vast continent, the question naturally arises: If these languages are genetically related, where was their original homeland? What light do the relationships that are evident in the languages today and the current geographic location of these languages shed on the history of the peoples of Africa? One of the leading 20th-century scholars of Niger-Congo languages, Kay Williamson, argues on the basis of the principle of least moves that for the Benue-Congo languages (which account for half of the Niger-Congo family) there is evidence pointing to an original homeland in the area of the confluence of the Niger and Benue rivers. Over many centuries, the peoples of the Benue-Congo group spread out mostly south and east. Beyond Williamson’s rather convincing hypothesis and broadening the discussion to all the other branches of Niger-Congo, there is no consensus among scholars as to the origins and historical development of Niger-Congo languages.

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Early records

Though Arabic documents of the 10th, 11th, and 12th centuries cite a few words that are probably taken from Niger-Congo languages, the earliest clearly identifiable words are found in Portuguese records in 1506. These words probably come from Karanga, a southeastern Bantu language. From then on eastern Bantu words and phrases occur in Portuguese records, and in 1523 a vocabulary that resembles modern Akan from Ghana was also recorded. In 1591 the Italian mathematician Filippo Pigafetta included a number of Kongo words and phrases in a description of the kingdom of Congo that he based on information provided by Oduardo Lopez, a Portuguese traveler to Luanda in 1578. The first extant book written in a Niger-Congo language was published in 1624. This 134-page book was the work of three Jesuit priests. It consists of a catechism in Portuguese with an interlinear translation into Kongo.

In 1659 the first known grammar of an African language, a 98-page study of Kongo, was published in Rome; it was the work of Giacinto Brusciotto, an Italian missionary, who notably described the characteristic noun class system. Though several other vocabularies and grammatical sketches followed, that century and the next saw a rather sparse number of works on African languages. Only in the 19th century did a significant number of vocabularies and grammars appear, and they came mostly from the pens of missionaries. They varied greatly in quality, and many were constrained by a Latin grammar straitjacket. Among the notable exceptions was the work of J.G. Christaller of the Basel Mission, whose grammar (1875) of the Asante (Ashanti) and Fante (Fanti) languages shows exceptional insight into language structures.

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Classification of Niger-Congo languages

In the 19th century, scholars began to attempt classification of the various Niger-Congo languages. Sigismund W. Koelle, a German missionary of the Church Missionary Society working among freed slaves in Freetown (now in Sierra Leone), produced his monumental work, Polyglotta Africana, in 1854. He obtained lists of 283 words in 156 languages and grouped them so as to reflect what he considered to be the relationships between the languages. Many of his language groups correspond closely to the current classification of these languages.

By the middle of the 19th century, scholars had begun to recognize that the languages of western and southern Africa were related, but the lack of detailed knowledge of the majority of these languages prevented serious classificatory study at that time. In 1927 the German scholar Diedrich Westermann recognized the distinction between the Western Sudanic (now called Niger-Congo) and the Eastern Sudanic (now called Nilo-Saharan) languages. Westermann also recognized the similarities between words in languages of his Western Sudanic group and those in Bantu languages, though he did not go on to draw the conclusion that pointed to a common genetic origin for these languages.

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This conclusion was first reached by Joseph H. Greenberg, whose work in the 1940s and ’50s established that Westermann’s Western Sudanic languages and Bantu formed a single genetic family, which Greenberg called for the first time Niger-Congo. The name was coined to reflect the predominance of these languages in the great river basins of the Niger and Congo rivers. Greenberg rejected any classification based merely on general typological features—e.g., that several languages possess noun classes—unless this was substantiated by a detailed comparison of the actual forms by which these systems were realized. Thus particular grammatical morphemes were compared across languages to see if they had similar forms and functions.

Greenberg’s main method, however, was what he called “mass comparison.” It involved comparing word lists of basic vocabulary from a large number of languages and establishing cognates in at least some (though not necessarily all) of the languages in each of the groupings he had established. Greenberg’s classificatory framework has largely been accepted by scholars, though some significant changes have been made. These changes are reflected in the latest overall classification published in 1989 as The Niger-Congo Languages, which is followed here.

The languages of present-day Niger-Congo are divided into nine major branches: Mande, Kordofanian, Atlantic, Ijoid, Kru, Gur, Adamawa-Ubangi, Kwa, and Benue-Congo, which are shown in bold in the diagram. (Scholars are not agreed on the classification of Dogon; hence it is listed separately, though it does not constitute a branch as do the other nine.)

The nine branches relate to each other in different ways, some being closer to each other than others. Adamawa-Ubangi and Gur, for example, appear to be closer to each other than, say, Kru and Kwa. These somewhat varied relationships reflect the fact that the nine major branches did not derive directly from a common ancestor. The intermediate steps that occurred over thousands of years can be tentatively reconstructed as in the diagram above, which attempts to show the most widely accepted hypothesis of the genetic origin of the branches now included in the Niger-Congo family.

This classification suggests that Mande and Kordofanian were the first two branches to break off from the original Niger-Congo family. It is not meant to imply that this occurred at the same time but merely that the languages in these two branches show greater divergence from all the other Niger-Congo languages, which are at that stage termed Atlantic-Congo.

The next divergences from the main language family gave rise to the languages now grouped as Atlantic and Ijoid. Subsequently the remaining group, labeled Volta-Congo, divided into five main branches: Kru, Kwa, Benue-Congo, Gur, and Adamawa-Ubangi. Dogon is included at this level because scholars have never been able to establish it as a member of any of the other branches.