Northern Bantoid (or North Bantoid) is a branch of the

Bantoid languages Bantoid is a major branch of the Benue–Congo language family. It consists of the Northern Bantoid languages and the Southern Bantoid languages, a division which also includes the Bantu languages that constitute the overwhelming majority and afte ...

. It consists of the Mambiloid, Dakoid, and

Tikar The Tikar (formally known as Tikari, Tigar, Tigari, and Tigre throughout their history) are a Central African ethnic group in Cameroon. They are known to be great artists, artisans and storytellers. Once a nomadic people, some oral traditions t ...

languages of eastern

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, ...

and west-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 ...

History

A proposal that divided Bantoid into North and South Bantoid was introduced by Williamson.Blench, Roger 987'A new classification of Bantoid languages.' Unpublished paper presented at 17th Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics, Leiden. Blench argues for the unity of North Bantoid by citing phonological, lexical, and morphological evidence.

Internal classification

Blench classifies these languages as North Bantoid. *''

'' (divergent) * Mambiloid (possibly including the divergent Ndoro–Fam languages) * Dakoid

Language contact

Dakoid languages have had long-term contact with

Adamawa languages The Adamawa languages are a putative family of 80–90 languages scattered across the Adamawa Plateau in Central Africa, in northern Cameroon, north-western Central African Republic, southern Chad, and eastern Nigeria, spoken altogether by on ...

, while the

Tikar language Tikar (also called Tigé, Tigré or Tikari) is a Northern Bantoid, semi-Bantu language that is spoken in Cameroon by the Tikar people, as well as by the Bedzan people, Bedzan Pygmies, who speak their own dialect of the language''.'' A recent hypo ...

shares many similarities with the

Bafia languages The Bafia languages are a clade of Bantu languages coded Zone A.50 in Guthrie's classification. According to Nurse & Philippson (2003), the languages form a valid node. They are: :Faʼ language, Fa’ (Lefa), Kaalong language, Kaalong (Dimbong), ...

(also known as the A50

Bantu languages The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu language, Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀), or Ntu languages are a language family of about 600 languages of Central Africa, Central, Southern Africa, Southern, East Africa, Eastern and Southeast Africa, South ...

).Blench, Roger
The North Bantoid hypothesis

Maps

File:Map of the Bantoid languages of Nigeria and Cameroon.svg, Map of the

of Nigeria and Cameroon File:Map of the Mambiloid languages.svg, Map of the

Mambiloid languages The twelve Mambiloid languages are languages spoken by the Mambila and related peoples mostly in eastern Nigeria and in Cameroon. In Nigeria the largest group is Mambila (there is also a small Mambila population in Cameroon). In Cameroon the l ...

File:Map of the Dakoid languages.svg, Map of the Dakoid languages File:Map of the Fam language.svg, Map of the Fam language

Numerals

Comparison of numerals in individual languages:

References

*Blench, Roger
The North Bantoid hypothesis
*Blench, Roger. 2011
'The membership and internal structure of Bantoid and the border with Bantu'
''Bantu IV'', Humboldt University, Berlin. {{Niger-Congo branches