The Adamawa–Ubangi languages are a geographic grouping and formerly postulated family of languages spoken in
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 of G ...
,
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 Repub ...
, the
Central African Republic
The Central African Republic (CAR; ; , RCA; , or , ) is a landlocked country in Central Africa. It is bordered by Chad to the north, Sudan to the northeast, South Sudan to the southeast, the DR Congo to the south, the Republic of the C ...
,
Cameroon
Cameroon (; french: Cameroun, ff, Kamerun), officially the Republic of Cameroon (french: République du Cameroun, links=no), is a country in west- central Africa. It is bordered by Nigeria to the west and north; Chad to the northeast; th ...
,
Gabon
Gabon (; ; snq, Ngabu), officially the Gabonese Republic (french: République gabonaise), is a country on the west coast of Central Africa. Located on the equator, it is bordered by Equatorial Guinea to the northwest, Cameroon to the north ...
, the
Republic of the Congo, the
Democratic Republic of the Congo
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (french: République démocratique du Congo (RDC), colloquially "La RDC" ), informally Congo-Kinshasa, DR Congo, the DRC, the DROC, or the Congo, and formerly and also colloquially Zaire, is a country in ...
and
South Sudan
South Sudan (; din, Paguot Thudän), officially the Republic of South Sudan ( din, Paankɔc Cuëny Thudän), is a landlocked country in East Africa. It is bordered by Ethiopia, Sudan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the ...
, 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),
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 Iv ...
, 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 wor ...
replaced Adamawa–Ubangi with a
Savannas
A savanna or savannah is a mixed woodland-grassland (i.e. grassy woodland) ecosystem characterised by the trees being sufficiently widely spaced so that the canopy does not close. The open canopy allows sufficient light to reach the ground to ...
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—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 a branch of the Bantu family often have partial
vowel harmony
In phonology, vowel harmony is an 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 typically long distance, me ...
, 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, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry gr ...
rather than
prefixes
A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Adding it to the beginning of one word changes it into another word. For example, when the prefix ''un-'' is added to the word ''happy'', it creates the word ''unhappy''. Particula ...
. 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