The Katla languages are two to three closely related languages that form a small

language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term ''family'' is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics ...

in the Nuba Hills of Sudan. Part of an erstwhile Kordofanian proposal, they are of uncertain position within the hypothetical Niger–Congo family. They do not share the characteristic morphology of Niger–Congo, such as the

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 a ...

system. Thus

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 ...

classifies them as a divergent branch of Niger–Congo outside the Atlantic–Congo core. A similar situation holds for another Kordofanian family, Rashad; these are not closely related to Katla.

References

* Roger Blench. Unpublished
Kordofanian and Niger–Congo: new and revised lexical evidence
* Roger Blench, 2011
Should Kordofanian be split up?
Nuba Hills Conference, Leiden Language families Kordofanian languages {{Kordofanian-lang-stub

See also

References