Niger-Kordofanian

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Related to Niger-Kordofanian: Niger-Congo

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Noun

Niger-Kordofanian - the family of languages that includes most of the languages spoken in Africa south of the Sahara; the majority of them are tonal languages but there are important exceptions (e.g., Swahili or Fula)

Niger-Kordofanian language

natural language, tongue - a human written or spoken language used by a community; opposed to e.g. a computer language

Kordofanian - a group of languages spoken in the relatively small Kordofan area of the south Sudan

Niger-Congo - a family of African language spoken in west Africa

Swahili - the most widely spoken Bantu languages; the official language of Kenya and Tanzania and widely used as a lingua franca in east and central Africa

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References in periodicals archive ?

(3) Other families or groups outside Asia that are SOV or predominantly SOV include Khoisan, Cushitic, Omotic, the Mande group of Niger-Kordofanian, Uralic (less Finnic), Papuan, Athabascan, Siouan, Uto-Aztecan, Hokan, Tanoan, Gulf, Chibchan-Paezan, Panoan, Tacanan, and Macro-Je.

Givon and others take the Niger-Kordofanian SVO languages to have been SOV on the basis of suffixing verb morphology and other features such as the locative suffix, which is thought to derive from a postposition (see, for example, Wald 1987: 1010).

Global trends in language *

The few educated southern Sudanese were, however, English-speaking (as a second language), whereas they spoke as their mother tongue a variety of Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Kordofanian languages (Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, Bari, Moru, Zande, etc.).