Niger-Congo phylum

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the world's largest language family by number of constituent languages, encompassing between 1,400 and 1,700 languages spoken by approximately 700 million people across most of sub-Saharan Africa; the family includes the vast Bantu branch, as well as Yoruba, Igbo, Akan, Wolof, Fulani, and hundreds of other languages; Niger-Congo languages share typological features including noun class systems, SVO word order, and tonal phonology, though the internal classification of the family — particularly the relationship between its major branches — remains a subject of active scholarly debate; the family's geographic extent corresponds roughly to the spread of agricultural and iron-working communities from West African centres of origin over several millennia