The Adamawa–Ubangi languages are a geographic grouping and formerly postulated family of languages spoken in

Nigeria Nigeria, officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf of Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean to the south. It covers an area of . With Demographics of Nigeria, ...

Chad Chad, officially the Republic of Chad, is a landlocked country at the crossroads of North Africa, North and Central Africa. It is bordered by Libya to Chad–Libya border, the north, Sudan to Chad–Sudan border, the east, the Central Afric ...

, the

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Gabon Gabon ( ; ), officially the Gabonese Republic (), is a country on the Atlantic coast of Central Africa, on the equator, bordered by Equatorial Guinea to the northwest, Cameroon to the north, the Republic of the Congo to the east and south, and ...

, the

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, the

Democratic Republic of the Congo The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), also known as the DR Congo, Congo-Kinshasa, or simply the Congo (the last ambiguously also referring to the neighbouring Republic of the Congo), is a country in Central Africa. By land area, it is t ...

and

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, by a total of about 12 million people.

History of classification

The family was proposed by

Joseph Greenberg Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages. Life Early life and education Joseph Greenberg was born on M ...

in '' The Languages of Africa'' under the name Adamawa–Eastern as a primary branch of the Niger–Congo family, which is in turn divided in two branches, Adamawa (e.g. Niellim) and Ubangian (e.g. Azande (

Zande language Zande is the largest of the Zande languages. It is spoken by the Azande, primarily in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and western South Sudan, but also in the eastern part of the Central African Republic. It is called Pazand ...

), Ngbandi, on which the creole Sango is based). Kleinewillinghöfer (2014) believes that the Adamawa languages are most closely related to the

Gur languages The Gur languages, also known as Central Gur or Mabia, belong to the Niger–Congo languages. They are spoken in the Sahelian and savanna regions of West Africa, namely: in most areas of Burkina Faso, and in south-central Mali, northeastern Ivor ...

, although the unity of both the Gur and the Adamawa branch is frequently questioned.

Roger Blench Roger Marsh Blench (born August 1, 1953) is a British linguist, ethnomusicologist and development anthropologist. He has an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and is based in Cambridge, England. He researches, publishes, and work ...

replaced Adamawa–Ubangi with a

Savannas A savanna or savannah is a mixed woodland-grassland (i.e. grassy woodland) biome and ecosystem characterised by the trees being sufficiently widely spaced so that the Canopy (forest), canopy does not close. The open canopy allows sufficient li ...

family, which includes Gur, Ubangian and the various branches of Adamawa as primary nodes. Dimmendaal (2008) doubts that Ubangian is a subfamily of Niger–Congo at all, preferring to classify it as an independent family until proven otherwise.

Demographics

The Adamawa languages are among the least studied in Africa, and include many endangered languages; by far the largest of the nearly one hundred small Adamawa languages is

Mumuye The Mumuye are people of the Taraba State, Nigeria. They speak the Mumuye language. They constitute the largest tribal group in Taraba State of Nigeria and form the predominant tribes found in Zing, Nigeria, Zing, Yorro, Jalingo, Ardo-Kola, Lau, ...

, at 400,000 speakers. A couple of

unclassified languages An unclassified language is a language whose genetic affiliation to other languages has not been established. Languages can be unclassified for a variety of reasons, mostly due to a lack of reliable data but sometimes due to the confounding inf ...

—notably Laal and Jalaa—are found along their fringes. Ubangian languages, while nearly as numerous, are somewhat better studied; one in particular, Sango, a Ngbandi-based creole, has become a major trade language of Central Africa.

Linguistic features

Adamawa–Ubangi languages often have partial

vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is a phonological rule in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – must share certain distinctive features (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, meaning tha ...

, involving restrictions on the co-occurrence of vowels in a word. As in most branches of the Niger–Congo family,

noun class In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some ...

systems are widespread. Adamawa–Ubangi languages are notable for having noun class

suffixes In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can ca ...

rather than

prefixes A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Particularly in the study of languages, a prefix is also called a preformative, because it alters the form of the word to which it is affixed. Prefixes, like other affixes, can b ...

. The noun class system is no longer fully productive in all languages. Adamawa subject pronouns (Boyd 1989Boyd, Raymond. 1989. Adamawa-Ubangi. In Bendor-Samuel, John (ed.), ''The Niger-Congo Languages: A Classification and Description of Africa's Largest Language Family'', 178-215. Lanham MD, New York & London: University Press of America.) were originally approximately: *"I": *''mi'' or *''ma'' *"you (sg.)": *''mo'' *"you (pl.): *''u'', *''ui'', *''i'' (+''n''?) The third person pronouns vary widely. In possessive constructions, the possessed typically precedes the possessor, and sentence order is usually subject–verb–object.

Classification

In Williamson and Blench (2000), since abandoned, the internal classification was:

References

External links

* Blench, Roger (2004).
List of Adamawa languages
'. {{DEFAULTSORT:Adamawa-Ubangi languages Volta–Congo languages