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
Central African Republic
The Central African Republic (CAR) is a landlocked country in Central Africa. It is bordered by Chad to Central African Republic–Chad border, the north, Sudan to Central African Republic–Sudan border, the northeast, South Sudan to Central ...
,
Cameroon
Cameroon, officially the Republic of Cameroon, is a country in Central Africa. It shares boundaries with Nigeria to the west and north, Chad to the northeast, the Central African Republic to the east, and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the R ...
,
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
Republic of the Congo
The Republic of the Congo, also known as Congo-Brazzaville, the Congo Republic or simply the Congo (the last ambiguously also referring to the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo), is a country located on the western coast of Central ...
, 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
South Sudan
South Sudan (), officially the Republic of South Sudan, is a landlocked country in East Africa. It is bordered on the north by Sudan; on the east by Ethiopia; on the south by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and Kenya; and on 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
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 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