The Upper Cross River languages form a branch of the
Cross River languages
The Cross River or Delta–Cross languages are a branch of the Benue–Congo language family spoken in south-easternmost Nigeria, with some speakers in south-westernmost Cameroon. The branch was first formulated by Joseph Greenberg; it is one of ...
of
Cross River State
Cross River State is a state in the South-South geopolitical zone of Nigeria. Named for the Cross River, the state was formed from the eastern part of the Eastern Region on 27 May 1967. The state has its capital as Calabar and is bordered to ...
,
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, ...
. The most populous languages are
Lokö and
Mbembe, with 100,000 speakers.
Languages
The internal structure per Cornell (1994), reproduced in Williamson and Blench (2000), is as follows:
Names and locations
Below is a list of language names, populations, and locations from Blench (2019).
Reconstruction
A reconstruction of Proto-Upper Cross River has been proposed by
Gerrit Dimmendaal
Gerrit Jan Dimmendaal (born 1955) is a Dutch linguist and Africanist. His research interests focused mainly on the Nilo-Saharan languages.Gerrit Dimmendaal, Colleen Ahland & Angelika Jakobi (2019) "Linguistic features and typologies in languages c ...
(1978).
[Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. 1978. ''The Consonants of Proto-Upper Cross and their Implications for the Classification of the Upper Cross Languages''. Leiden: Leiden University.]
See also
*
List of Proto-Upper Cross River reconstructions (Wiktionary)
References
External links
ComparaLex database with Upper Cross River word lists
{{Niger-Congo branches
Cross River languages