The Mangbetu–Asoa or Mangbetu languages of the
Central Sudanic language family are a cluster of closely related languages spoken in the
Democratic Republic of 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 ...
.
The languages are
Mangbetu, spoken by perhaps a million people, and the smaller
Lombi and
Asoa.
Blench (2000) considers Lombi to be part of the Mangbetu dialect continuum. Asoa is spoken by
Pygmies
In anthropology, pygmy peoples are ethnic groups whose average height is unusually short. The term pygmyism is used to describe the phenotype of endemic short stature (as opposed to disproportionate dwarfism occurring in isolated cases in a po ...
.
Proto-Mangbetu has been reconstructed by Demolin (1992).
[Demolin, Didier. 1992. ''Le Mangbetu: etude phonétique et phonologique'', 2 vols. Brussels: Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres, Université libre de Bruxelles dissertation.]
Comparative vocabulary
Mangbetu-Asua languages comparative lexicon:
[Demolin, Didier. 2021. ]
The languages of the Ituri forest Pygmies: contact and historical perspectives
'
Diedrich Westermann-Workshop
(West-central African linguistic history between Macro-Sudan Belt and Niger-Congo: commemorating Diedrich Westermann’s legacy and the 100th anniversary of the Berlin professorship for African languages), 4-6 November 2021, Humboldt University of Berlin
The Humboldt University of Berlin (, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin, Germany.
The university was established by Frederick William III on the initiative of Wilhelm von Humbol ...
.
See also
*
List of Proto-Mangbetu reconstructions (Wiktionary)
*
Central Sudanic word lists (Wiktionary)
Footnotes
References
Nilo-Saharan list(Blench 2000)
Central Sudanic languages
Languages of South Sudan
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