The Niger-Congo language family is one of the largest language families in the world and the largest one in Africa in terms of its geographical spread across most of sub-Saharan Africa,

Afro-Asiatic Nilo-Saharan Niger-Congo Khoisan Austronesian

number of speakers, and the sheer number of languages (1514). Almost all of the most widely spoken languages of sub-Saharan Africa belong to the Niger-Congo family, and about 600 million people (85% of Africa's population) speak a Niger-Congo language. There is no consensus among scholars about the origins and historical development of Niger-Congo languages.

The earliest evidence of a Niger-Congo language dates back to Portuguese records of the 16th century. However, few grammars were published prior to the 19th century although the first known grammar of an African language (Kongo) was written by an Italian missionary in 1659. A number of dictionaries and grammars appeared in the 19th century. They were written mostly by European missionaries who often lacked the linguistic training necessary to analyze languages that had little in common with their own. With a few exceptions, the resulting descriptions forced these languages into an ill-fitting Latin straitjacket.

Determining the number of languages in this family is complicated by the fact that it is often difficult to decide, in the absence of written historical records, whether two language varieties are two dialects of the same language or two separate languages.

The Niger-Congo language family is usually divided several major branches that are estimated to have split from the ancestral language some 5,000 years ago. The majority of languages in these branches have small populations of speakers, with a significant percentage of them averaging only several thousand people. Scores of languages are often found clustered together in relatively small geographic areas.

By far the most populous branch of the Niger-Congo family is the Benue-Congo group that includes over 700 languages. These languages are spoken from eastern Nigeria across the rest of central, eastern, and southern Africa. 47 of them are spoken by more than 1 million people, and, of these, 21 have more than 3 million speakers. The largest languages are listed below. Some of these branches are closer to each other than others because they split from the ancestral language at different times.
For a complete listing of Niger-Congo languages consult Ethnologue.

Solomana Kante

Most Niger-Congo languages remained unwritten until the 19th century when European missionaries attempted to create writing systems, dictionaries, and grammars for these hitherto undescribed languages. They used the letters of the Latin alphabet to represent sounds of Niger-Congo languages that had no counterparts in Indo-European languages. As a result, some of the alphabets they created were not well-suited to represent Niger-Congo languages, particularly those that have tones, breathy and creaky vowels, clicks, prenasalized, ejective, and implosive consonants. Nevertheless, most Niger-Congo languages today are written in various adaptations of the Latin alphabet.

An exception is the N'Ko alphabet that was invented in 1949 in Guinea by Solomana Kante for writing in Malinke. It is mainly used by speakers of Malinke, Bambara, and Jula (Dyula) in Guinea, Senegal, Burkina-Faso, Mali and Côte-d'Ivoir. The N'Ko alphabet contains 26 symbols, including 7 vowels, 18 consonant, and one semivowel. There are also characters for the numerals 1-10. The N'Ko alphabet is written from right to left in horizontal lines, nasalization is indicated by diacritics below the vowels, length and tone are indicated by diacritics over the vowels.

Here is a sample text in N'ko. It bears visual resemblance to the Arabic script.

Click here to learn more about the N'ko alphabet.

1. Do you see any similarities in the numerals among the Niger-Congo languages listed below?
2. Do some numerals display more similarities across languages than others?
3. Can you note any systematic correspondences between/among these languages?
   

Click on the name of the Niger-Congo language to learn more about it on this website.

Swahili
Yoruba
Xhosa
Zulu