Niger-Congo Languages

Abstract

The Niger-Congo languages show an enormous geographic distribution across the African continent, ranging from Senegal in the north to South Africa in the south. This puts them in contact with a number of other African language families, resulting in distinctive influences for different subgroups, e.g., Khoisan influence on the Bantu languages in the south of the continent and Chadic influence on Benue-Congo languages much farther to the north. With respect to the internal patterns of Niger-Congo, one finds a striking region, roughly in the family’s center, where a number of subgroups have been affected by areally-determined changes, involving, for example, reductions in word size and noun class systems. One result of these changes is a center-periphery pattern, where Atlantic languages in the family’s northern zone and Bantu languages in its southern one share typological features that are frequently lacking in the languages between them. Part of the explanation for these changes must lie outside of Niger-Congo itself, since the most affected branches of the family lie within a proposed large linguistic area that crosscuts a number of phyla and has recently been labelled the Macro-Sudan belt. A different issue relating to areality is presented by observed low-level patterns of language creation and diversification in the family. These suggest that a distinctive language ideology is held by the multilingual societies that characterize much of the Niger-Congo area which is likely to play a key role in devising comprehensive models of the family’s areal development. Niger-Congo languages 1 Niger-Congo: A stock spanning many areas Niger-Congo is one of the largest language families in the world—perhaps even the largest— spanning an enormous area of Africa from the southern edge of the Sahara desert to the south of the continent itself. It further spreads across a diverse range of ecological environments, from rain forest to desert, as well as a number of apparent linguistic areas. Its internal genealogical diversity is similarly remarkable, as well as controversial in some key respects. Any discussion of the areal linguistics of the family can only begin to scratch the surface, especially if sociocultural dimensions of its language dynamics are to be taken into account. The goal of this chapter is, therefore, merely to give some general sense of the “flavor” of the areal patterns of the family’s languages and highlight select topics that they raise of potential interest to the study of areal linguistics generally. The discussion begins with an overview of the geographic distribution of the family and the state of the art with respect to the genealogical classifications of its languages in section 2. A brief summary is then given regarding salient features that most Niger-Congo languages have in common in order to set a “baseline” for discussion of areal patterns within the family, which is the subject of section 3. The paper then shifts in section 4 from a more geographic-centered view of areality to consider the relatively underexplored issue of how an appreciation of the social dynamics of speakers of Niger-Congo languages is likely to play a crucial role in coming to a fuller understanding of the family’s areal patterns. In section 5, the paper concludes with a brief discussion of possible future directions for the study of Niger-Congo areal linguistics. 2 Genealogical and geographic overview 2.1 Genealogical overview Niger-Congo is the largest referential language group in world (Williamson & Blench 2000: 11), dominating Subsaharan Africa geographically. The extent to which the “traditional” group of Niger-Congo languages forms a true genealogical unit is not clear, however, and this obviously complicates any examination of the areal linguistics of the family. Overviews of Niger-Congo can