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Home > Adamawa-Ubangi languages


 

The Adamawa-Ubangi languages are spoken in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, southern Sudan, and the Central African Republic, by a total of about 12 million people. The group belongs to the Niger-Congo languages. It is divided into two groups:

The group was first set up by Joseph H. Greenberg in 1963, under the name Adamawa-Eastern. Within Niger-Congo, its closest affiliation is widely believed to be with Gur, although the internal classification of Niger-Congo still has many uncertainties.

Adamawa-Ubangi languages often have partial vowel harmony, involving restrictions on the co-occurrence of vowels in a word.

Noun class systems are widespread, although some languages have lost them.

Some of the subject pronouns (Boyd 1989) seem to have originally been along the lines of:

The third person pronouns vary widely.

In possessive constructions, the possessed typically precedes the possessor, and sentence order is usually subject- verb- object.

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