The Talodi–Heiban languages are a proposed branch of the hypothetical Niger–Congo family, spoken in the Nuba Mountains of

Sudan Sudan ( or ; ar, السودان, as-Sūdān, officially the Republic of the Sudan ( ar, جمهورية السودان, link=no, Jumhūriyyat as-Sūdān), is a country in Northeast Africa. It shares borders with the Central African Republic t ...

. The Talodi and Heiban languages are thought to be distantly related by Dimmendaal, though ''

Glottolog ''Glottolog'' is a bibliographic database of the world's lesser-known languages, developed and maintained first at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (between 2015 and 2020 at the Max Planck Institute for ...

'' 4.4 does not accept the unity of Talodi–Heiban pending further evidence.

Classification

Roger Blench (2016) notes that the Talodi and Heiban branches share many typological similarities, but few lexical similarities. Blench (2016) considers Talodi and Heiban to each be separate, independent Niger-Congo branches that had later converged due to mutual contact. Talodi and Heiban had each constituted a group of the Kordofanian branch of Niger–Congo that was posited by Joseph Greenberg (1963); Talodi has also been called Talodi–Masakin, and Heiban has also been called Koalib or Koalib–Moro. Roger Blench notes that the Talodi and Heiban families have the noun-class systems characteristic of the Atlantic–Congo core of Niger–Congo, but that the Katla languages (another putative branch of Kordofanian) have no trace of ever having had such a system, whereas the Kadu languages and some of the Rashad languages appear to have acquired noun classes as part of a ''

Sprachbund A sprachbund (, lit. "language federation"), also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, or diffusion area, is a group of languages that share areal features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact. The lang ...

,'' rather than having inherited them. He concludes that the Kordofanian languages do not form a genealogical group, but that Talodi–Heiban is core Niger–Congo, whereas Katla and Rashad form a peripheral branch (or perhaps branches) along the lines of

Mande Mande may refer to: * Mandé peoples of western Africa * Mande languages * Manding, a term covering a subgroup of Mande peoples, and sometimes used for one of them, Mandinka * Garo people of northeastern India and northern Bangladesh * Mande River ...

. The Kadu languages may be

Nilo-Saharan The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50–60 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet. T ...

. * † = extinct Lafofa (Tegem), sometimes classified as a divergent Talodi language, has a different set of cognates with other Niger–Congo and has been placed in its own branch of Niger–Congo.

Norton & Alaki (2015)

Norton & Alaki (2015: 76, 126)Norton, Russell, and Thomas Kuku Alaki. 2015. The Talodi Languages: A Comparative-Historical Analysis. ''Occasional papers in the study of Sudanese languages'' 11:31-161. classify the Talodi languages as follows. Proto-Talodi, Proto-Lumun-Torona, and Proto-Narrow Talodi have also been reconstructed by Norton & Alaki (2015).

Relationship

Lexical correspondences between Proto-Heiban and Proto-Talodi according to Blench (2016): Noun class prefix comparison between Proto-Heiban and Proto-Talodi according to Blench (2016):Blench, Roger. 2016
Do Heiban and Talodi form a genetic group and how are they related to Niger-Congo?

Notes

* Roger Blench. Unpublished
Kordofanian and Niger–Congo: new and revised lexical evidence
* Roger Blench, 2011
Should Kordofanian be split up?
Nuba Hills Conference, Leiden * Blench, Roger. 2016
Do Heiban and Talodi form a genetic group and how are they related to Niger-Congo?
{{DEFAULTSORT:Talodi-Heiban languages Kordofanian languages South Kordofan Proposed language families

Classification

Norton & Alaki (2015)

Relationship

See also

Notes