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Greenberg reduces Africa to four families

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The Languages of Africa proposed a classification of the continent's languages into four families — Afroasiatic, Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan — using multilateral comparison of large numbers of languages rather than prior reconstruction. The classification replaced a fragmented and partly racially framed colonial-era literature and reorganised African linguistics. Its Afroasiatic and Niger-Congo components are broadly retained; Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan are far less widely accepted, and the wider Niger-Congo grouping still lacks a reconstruction of the kind that underwrites Indo-European.

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