On the origin of Niger-Congo nominal classification

Abstract

The Niger-Congo (NC) Superfamily of languages is the largest family of languages spoken in Africa. Researchers have assumed that the NC speakers originated in West Africa in the Inland Niger Delta. The research indicates that the NC speakers originated in the Saharan Highlands 12kya and belonged to the Ounanian culture. The NC population cultivated millet from Saharan Africa to South India. Phylogenetically the NC mtDNA haplogroups include L1,L2,L3, U5, L3(M,N). The y-Chromosome haplotypes associated with the NC population were A,B, E1b1a, E1b1b, E2, E3a and R1. A major finding was that the Atlantic, Mande and Dravidian languages of India, form a new NC Subfamily we can designate Indo-African.

The evolution of the noun class system of Ngwi (West-Coastal Bantu, B861, DRC)

“…Maho 1999). Even though we cannot substantiate this scenario with empirical evidence, research suggests that noun class prefixes tend to be more conservative than agreement morphology on other constituents of the noun phrase (Kießling 2013;Güldemann & Fiedler 2019).…”