The Volta–Niger family of languages, also known as West Benue–Congo or East Kwa, is one of the branches of the
Niger–Congo language family, with perhaps 70 million speakers. Among these are the most important languages of southern
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 ...
,
Benin
Benin ( , ; french: Bénin , ff, Benen), officially the Republic of Benin (french: République du Bénin), and formerly Dahomey, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Togo to the west, Nigeria to the east, Burkina Faso to the north ...
,
Togo
Togo (), officially the Togolese Republic (french: République togolaise), is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Ghana to the west, Benin to the east and Burkina Faso to the north. It extends south to the Gulf of Guinea, where its c ...
, and southeast
Ghana
Ghana (; tw, Gaana, ee, Gana), officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It abuts the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, sharing borders with Ivory Coast in the west, Burkina Faso in the north, and To ...
:
Yoruba
The Yoruba people (, , ) are a West African ethnic group that mainly inhabit parts of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo. The areas of these countries primarily inhabited by Yoruba are often collectively referred to as Yorubaland. The Yoruba constitute ...
,
Igbo
Igbo may refer to:
* Igbo people, an ethnic group of Nigeria
* Igbo language, their language
* anything related to Igboland, a cultural region in Nigeria
See also
* Ibo (disambiguation)
* Igbo mythology
* Igbo music
* Igbo art
*
* Igbo-Ukwu, a ...
,
Bini, and
Gbe.
These languages have variously been placed within the
Kwa or
Benue–Congo families, but Williamson & Blench (2000) separate them from both. The boundaries between the various branches of Volta–Niger are rather vague, suggesting diversification of a
dialect continuum
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of Variety (linguistics), language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulat ...
rather than a clear split of families, which suggest a close origin.
Branches
The constituent groups of the Volta–Niger family, along with the most important languages in terms of number of speakers, are as follows (with number of languages for each branch in parentheses):
The Yoruboid languages and Akoko were once linked as the
Defoid branch, but more recently they, Edoid, and Igboid have been suggested to be primary branches of an as-yet unnamed group, often abbreviated . Similarly, Oko, Nupoid, and Idomoid are often grouped together under the acronym . Ukaan is an Atlantic–Congo language, but it is unclear if it belongs to the Volta–Niger family; Blench suspects it is closer to
Benue–Congo.
In an automated computational analysis (
ASJP
The Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) is a collaborative project applying computational approaches to comparative linguistics using a database of word lists. The database is open access and consists of 40-item basic-vocabulary lists ...
4) by Müller et al. (2013):
[Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013. ]
ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013)
'.
*
Gbe and
Yoruboid
Yoruboid is a 'megagroup' of 14 related language clades, composed of the Igala group of dialects spoken in south central Nigeria, and the Edekiri group spoken in a band across Togo, Ghana, Benin and southern Nigeria, including the Itsekiri of W ...
are subsumed within
Kwa.
*
Edoid
The Edoid languages are a few dozen languages spoken in Southern Nigeria, predominantly in the former Bendel State. The name ''Edoid'' derives from its most widely spoken member, Edo, the language of Benin City, which has 25 million native and ...
and
Cross River group together.
*
Akpes and
Ukaan group together.
*
Oko
OKO ( rus, ОКО, r=, literally means eye, also an abbreviation for Ob'yedinonnyye Kristallom Osnovaniya ( rus, Oбъединённые Кристаллом Oснования, r=, literally means Foundations Bound by a Crystal)) is a complex o ...
is grouped within
Idomoid.
Branches and locations
![Map of African languages](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Map_of_African_languages.svg)
Below is a list of major Volta–Niger branches and their primary locations (centres of diversity) in Nigeria based on Blench (2019).
Comparative vocabulary
![Nigeria Benin Cameroon languages](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Nigeria_Benin_Cameroon_languages.png)
Sample basic vocabulary in different Volta–Niger branches:
Numerals
Comparison of numerals in individual languages:
See also
*
Systematic graphic of the Niger–Congo languages with numbers of speakers
References
*Wolf, Paul Polydoor de (1971) ''The Noun Class System of Proto-Benue–Congo'' (Thesis, Leiden University). The Hague/Paris: Mouton.
*Williamson, Kay (1989) 'Benue–Congo Overview', pp. 248–274 in Bendor-Samuel, John & Rhonda L. Hartell (eds.) ''The Niger–Congo Languages — A classification and description of Africa's largest language family''. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America.
*Williamson & Blench (2000) 'Niger–Congo', in Heine & Nurse, ''African Languages''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Volta-Niger languages
Volta–Congo languages