The Upper Cross River languages form a branch of the
Cross River languages
The Cross River or Delta–Cross languages are a branch of the Benue–Congo language family spoken in south-easternmost Nigeria, with some speakers in south-westernmost Cameroon. The branch was first formulated by Joseph Greenberg; it is one of ...
of
Cross River State
)
, image_map = Nigeria - Cross River.svg
, map_alt =
, map_caption = Location of Cross River State in Nigeria
, coordinates =
, coor_pinpoint ...
,
Nigeria
Nigeria ( ), , ig, Naìjíríyà, yo, Nàìjíríà, pcm, Naijá , ff, Naajeeriya, kcg, Naijeriya officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf o ...
. The most populous languages are
Loko and
Mbembe, with 100,000 speakers.
Languages
The internal structure per Cornell (1994), reproduced in Williamson and Blench (2000), is as follows:
Names and locations
Below is a list of language names, populations, and locations from Blench (2019).
Reconstruction
A reconstruction of Proto-Upper Cross River has been proposed by
Gerrit Dimmendaal
Gerrit Jan Dimmendaal (born 1955) is a Dutch linguist and Africanist. His research interests focused mainly on the Nilo-Saharan languages.Gerrit Dimmendaal, Colleen Ahland & Angelika Jakobi (2019) "Linguistic features and typologies in languages c ...
(1978).
[Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. 1978. ''The Consonants of Proto-Upper Cross and their Implications for the Classification of the Upper Cross Languages''. Leiden: Leiden University.]
See also
*
List of Proto-Upper Cross River reconstructions (Wiktionary)
References
External links
ComparaLex database with Upper Cross River word lists
{{Niger-Congo branches
Cross River languages