Niger-Congo

[ nahy-jer-kong-goh ]

noun

1. a subfamily of Niger-Kordofanian, that comprises a large number of languages of Africa, as Ewe, Ibo, Yoruba, and the Bantu languages, spoken in nearly all of the equatorial forest region and in much of southern Africa.

adjective

1. of, belonging to, or constituting Niger-Congo.

Niger-Congo

noun

1. a family of languages of Africa consisting of the Bantu languages together with most of the languages of the coastal regions of West Africa. The chief branches are Benue-Congo (including Bantu), Kwa, Mande, and West Atlantic

adjective

1. relating to or belonging to this family of languages

Example Sentences

Fon is part of the Niger-Congo family of languages, meaning it shares a common ancestral lineage, with languages spoken in parts of West, Central, East and Southern Africa.

From BBC

Thus, the evidence derived from plant names in modern African languages permits us to glimpse the existence of three languages being spoken in Africa thousands of years ago: ancestral Nilo-Saharan, ancestral Niger-Congo, and ancestral Afroasiatic.

From Literature

Both Swahili and the Ndebele languages belong to the Bantu family, a branch of the Niger-Congo languages spoken among a network of sub-Saharan ethnic groups.

From Time

In particular, Afroasiatic speakers mostly prove to be people who would be classified as whites or blacks, Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo speakers prove to be blacks, Khoisan speakers Khoisan, and Austronesian speakers Indonesian.

From Literature

We’ve now seen, from Niger-Congo language distributions, that the blacks who did the engulfing were the Bantu.

From Literature