Introduction
The Chadic branch consists of about 150 languages spoken south of the Sahara desert and stretching from the south of Niger, across northern Nigeria, northern Cameroon and south-central Chad.

Status
The Chadic branch includes many languages that are spoken by small numbers of people and that have no written form. Many of them are seriously endangered, and some are extinct, or almost extinct.

The table below lists Chadic languages with 100,000 or more speakers.

As you can see, the most populous language is Hausa, a West Chadic language spoken by up to 25 million people, of whom about 19 million live in Nigeria, 5 million in Niger, and 1 million in Cameroon, Togo, and Benin. It is the official language of Nigeria and the lingua franca of much of West Africa.

Sound system
Vowels
Most Chadic languages have three vowels that can be either long or short, e.g., /i/ - /i:/, /u/ - /u:/, /a/ - /a:/. Vowel length makes a difference in word meaning. This rather sparse vowel system is similar to the vowel systems of the Berber and Semitic languages.

Consonants
Chadic languages are distinguished by the presence of

• a lateral fricative*
• glottalized sounds
• prenasalized sounds**

*English does not possess this sound, but English speakers can approximate it by pronouncing the sounds [h] and [l] simultaneously.
**A prenasalized sound can be produced by pronouncing a nasal consonant together with another consonant. Try pronouncing [mb], [mp], or [nd] simultaneously.

Tones
All Chadic languages are tonal which distinguishes them from other branches of the Afro-Asiatic family. The most common Chadic tone system has high (H) and low (L) level tones, e.g., Hausa fárí: (HH) "white" and fárì: (HL) "drought." Some Chadic languages have three tones: High, Medium, and Low.

Grammar
Noun phrase
Chadic nouns and pronouns distinguish masculine and feminine genders in the singular but have only a single plural that does not distinguish gender. There is no noun declension.

Verb phrase
The verb is for the most part a combination of an auxiliary verb (prefix conjugation) followed by a verbal noun with a vowel suffix indicating whether the verb is transitive or intransitive.

Sentence structure
All Chadic languages rely on word order and prepositions to express grammatical relations. Word order in most Chadic languages is Subject-Verb-Object, as in this sentence from Mesme (also called Zime):

Vocabulary
Chadic languages, especially Hausa, have borrowings from Arabic, and other neighboring non-Afro-Asiatic languages.