The Adamawa–Ubangi languages are a geographic grouping and formerly postulated family of languages spoken in
Nigeria,
Chad
Chad (; ar, تشاد , ; french: Tchad, ), officially the Republic of Chad, '; ) is a landlocked country at the crossroads of North and Central Africa. It is bordered by Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, the Central African Republic ...
, the
Central African Republic,
Cameroon,
Gabon, the
Republic of the Congo
The Republic of the Congo (french: République du Congo, ln, Republíki ya Kongó), also known as Congo-Brazzaville, the Congo Republic or simply either Congo or the Congo, is a country located in the western coast of Central Africa to the w ...
, the
Democratic Republic of the Congo and
South Sudan, by a total of about 12 million people.
History of classification
The family was proposed by
Joseph Greenberg 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
The Niellim language (autonym ''lwaà'') is a Bua language spoken by some 5,000 people (as of 1993) along the Chari River in southern Chad. It is mainly spoken in two areas: one around the city of Sarh (to which many - perhaps most - speakers ha ...
) and
Ubangian (e.g.
Azande (
Zande language),
Ngbandi, on which the
creole Sango is based). Kleinewillinghöfer (2014) believes that the Adamawa languages are most closely related to the
Gur languages, although the unity of both the Gur and the Adamawa branch is frequently questioned.
Roger Blench replaced Adamawa–Ubangi with a
Savannas 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, at 400,000 speakers. A couple of
unclassified languages
An unclassified language is a language whose Genetic relationship (linguistics), 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 s ...
—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 an Assimilation (linguistics), assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is t ...
, involving restrictions on the co-occurrence of vowels in a word.
As in most branches of the Niger–Congo family,
noun class systems are widespread. Adamawa–Ubangi languages are notable for having noun class
suffixes rather than
prefixes. The noun class system is no longer fully productive in all languages.
Adamawa subject pronouns (Boyd 1989
[Boyd, 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