III.

Niger-Congo Family

Languages in the Niger-Congo family have an estimated 300 million to 400 million speakers. The family has seven main subgroups, six of which cover West Africa and the Central African Republic. Bantu, a single offshoot of the seventh subgroup, is spoken in most of the southern half of Africa. The subgroups of the Niger-Congo family are Benue-Congo (including Bantu), West Atlantic, Mande, Voltaic, Kwa, Adamawa East, and Kordofanian. The Niger-Congo family descends from a protolanguage dating back 5000 years.

The Benue-Congo subgroup is the largest branch of the Niger-Congo family. Bantu languages, one of its branches, have nearly 100 million speakers. Some historical linguists and archaeologists have theorized that the rapid expansion of Bantu languages from the proto-Bantu homeland in Cameroon and eastern Nigeria occurred in three major waves of migration, from 3000 to 4000 years ago. Their research indicates that the first wave of expansion created North Bantu. The second and third expansions developed into Western and Eastern Bantu. Swahili, the most widely spoken language in Africa with nearly 50 million speakers, derives from Eastern Bantu. Other Bantu languages include Shona, Tswana, Zulu, and Xhosa, spoken in southern Africa; Kikuyu, Kisukuma and Luo, spoken in eastern Africa; and Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, and Kirundi, spoken in central Africa.

Languages in the West Atlantic subgroup are spoken near Africa’s Atlantic coast, from Senegal to Chad. The dominant language of this group, Fulfulde, has more than 13 million speakers in Senegal, Cameroon, and Chad. Other languages in this subgroup include Wolof in Senegal and Temne in Guinea. Languages in the Mande subgroup are spoken in Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Bambara, spoken in Mali, is the principal language in this subgroup. Other Mande languages include Mende, spoken in Sierra Leone, and Kpelle, spoken in Liberia and Guinea.

The Voltaic subgroup, also referred to as Gur, has speakers in Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, and Burkina Faso. Kwa languages include Twi and Yoruba, spoken in Ghana and Nigeria respectively. Yoruba has the largest number of speakers in this subgroup, with more than 22 million. Other Kwa languages are spoken in Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, and Benin. Languages of the Adamawa East subgroup are spoken in Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), and the Central African Republic. The Kordofanian subgroup has fewer than 500,000 speakers in the Nuba mountains of Sudan. Moro, the language in this subgroup with the most speakers, has about 30,000.

Most languages in the Niger-Congo family, with the exception of Swahili and Fulfulde, are tonal. In tonal languages, the meaning of the same set of letters may vary with the pitch at which the speaker pronounces them. In Yoruba, for example, the word bi means “to deliver a baby” if pronounced with a middle tone, but if pronounced with a low tone it means “to throw up,” and if pronounced with a high tone, “to ask.” In Bambara, the word ba means “river” when pronounced with a high tone, and “goat” when pronounced with a low tone.

Bantu languages and other languages in the Benue-Congo subgroup form verbs by adding prefixes and suffixes to a verb stem. Prefixes, which come before the verb stem, indicate who (the subject), when (the time period), and what (the object); suffixes, which come after the verb stem, express prepositional phrases, causal relationships, and passive voice. The English sentence “He is cooking for me,” for example, can be expressed by a single word, ananipikia, in Swahili. In Shona, another Bantu language, ari kundibikira expresses “he is cooking for me.” The verb stem pik in Swahili and bik in Shona are cognates that can be traced back to the proto-Bantu language. Other words that can be traced back to the Niger-Congo protolanguage include “yesterday,” which is jana in Swahili (Bantu subgroup) and ana in Yoruba (Kwa subgroup), and “three,” which is tatu in Swahili, eeta in Yoruba, and ati in Fulfulde (West Atlantic subgroup).

Another important feature of languages in the Benue-Congo subgroup is a noun class system in which prefixes and suffixes are attached to the noun stem. In Bantu languages, nouns normally consist of a prefix followed by a noun stem. The prefix can indicate number, the equivalent in English of one person and people. In Swahili m before a noun indicates one, and wa indicates more than one; thus, mtu means “one person” and watu, “people.” In Zulu the singular/plural alternation is umu/aba, and umuntu and abantu designate “one person” and “people.” In Shona this alternation is mu/va, and munhu/vanhu express whether one person or more than one is meant. The Swahili watu, Zulu abantu, and Shona vanhu are similar words that go back to proto-Bantu.

In Bantu languages nouns and other parts of speech—such as demonstratives (“this” and “those,” for example), verbs, and adjectives—undergo changes for agreement, as the following example demonstrates. The English sentence “This good chair is broken” is expressed in Swahili as kiti hiki kizuri kimevunjika; the plural form, “These good chairs are broken,” becomes viti hivi vizuri vimevunjika. The prefixes ki- and vi- of kiti/viki (chair/chairs) agree with the demonstrative hiki/hivi (this/these), the adjectives kizuri/vizuri (good), and the verbs kimevunjika/vimevunjika (broken). This type of agreement occurs in all Bantu languages.