Niger-Congo

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The grouping that covers most of sub-Saharan Africa west, central and south, and by number of member languages is normally reported as the largest family in the world — over a thousand, of which the Bantu languages alone make up several hundred. Its most striking shared feature is the noun-class system: nouns sort into a dozen or more genders marked by prefixes, with agreement running through the clause, and the correspondences between class markers across widely separated branches are the backbone of the classification. The grouping was assembled by Joseph Greenberg in his 1963 Languages of Africa, which reduced a chaotic prior literature to four African families and reshaped the field. Its status today is deliberately uneven. Bantu is one of the best-demonstrated groups anywhere, with a securely reconstructed proto-language; the wider family is not established to the same standard, no full Proto-Niger-Congo reconstruction commands consensus, and the membership of Mande and of the Kordofanian languages is questioned by specialists. Niger-Congo is therefore an instructive case of a grouping that is very probably real and not yet demonstrated in the way Indo-European is.