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

Sudan Sudan, officially the Republic of the Sudan, is a country in Northeast Africa. It borders the Central African Republic to the southwest, Chad to the west, Libya to the northwest, Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the east, Eritrea and Ethiopi ...

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

Glottolog ''Glottolog'' is an open-access online bibliographic database of the world's languages. In addition to listing linguistic materials ( grammars, articles, dictionaries) describing individual languages, the database also contains the most up-to-d ...

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

Classification

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 ...

(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 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 ...

(1963); Talodi has also been called Talodi–Masakin, and Heiban has also been called Koalib or Koalib–Moro.

notes that the Talodi and Heiban families have 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 ...

systems characteristic of the Atlantic–Congo core of Niger–Congo, but that the

Katla languages The Katla languages are two to three closely related languages that form a small language family in the Nuba Hills of Sudan. Part of an erstwhile Kordofanian proposal, they are of uncertain position within the hypothetical Niger–Congo family. ...

(another putative branch of Kordofanian) have no trace of ever having had such a system, whereas the

Kadu languages The Kadu languages, also known as Kadugli–Krongo or Tumtum, are a small language family of the Kordofanian languages, Kordofanian geographic grouping, once included in Niger–Congo. However, since Thilo C. Schadeberg, Thilo Schadeberg (1981), ...

and some of the

Rashad languages The Rashad languages form a small language family in the Nuba Hills of Sudan. They are named after Rashad District of South Kordofan. Classification Part of an erstwhile Kordofanian languages, Kordofanian proposal, they are of uncertain position ...

appear to have acquired noun classes as part of a ''

Sprachbund A sprachbund (, from , '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. Th ...

,'' 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, their Niger-Congo languages * Manding languages, Manding, a term covering a subgroup of Mande peoples, and sometimes used for one of them, Mandinka people, Mandinka * Garo p ...

. The Kadu languages may be

Nilo-Saharan The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of around 210 African languages spoken by somewhere around 70 million speakers, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributari ...

. * † = 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