Niger-Congo

The features of the language of Black or African Americans, i.e., United States slave descendants of West and Niger-Congo African origin, has been recognized, described and discussed for several decades.

Whether or not these hybrid speech genres are a species of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) or something like Bombay Bazaar Hindi-English (BBHE), whether the grammatical structure of "Ain't nobody sing like Chaka Khan" comes from the Niger-Congo Basin, or the rhetorical particularity of "Miss Pushpa is smiling and smiling/ even for no reason" can be traced back to Hindi speech patterns common to Bombay's Bhindi Bazaar, the world of these utterances cannot be reduced to the description of speech as an "object" of linguistic study or a functionalist form of verbal communication without doing violence to the living tongue.

Faraclas identifies a feature common in Caribbean creoles--declarative rising intonation contours--that may reflect the influence of non-European feminized speech (present in Niger-Congo, but occurring also in Celtic, as well as in white middleclass American/British English).

(1) Kirundi (Niger-Congo, Bantu) (adapted from Mel' cuck and Bakiza 1997: 286) a.

Contributors cover such topic as synchronic and diachronic evidence for parallels between noun phrases and sentences, the development of Creole languages, oppositions from proto-Indo-European to Latin, the development of early to late Latin, the history of two Greek tenses, actionality and aspect in Hittite, imperfectivity and complete events, transitions in Portuguese and Spanish, the old Nordic middle voice, tense and aspect in Semitic languages, the verb phrase in the Kerebe language, comparative TAM morphology in Niger-Congo, indexicals in Australian languages, and differential object marking in Sahidic Coptic.

Focus strategies in African languages; the interaction of focus and grammar in Niger-Congo and Afro-Asiatic.

Some of the 60 lesser-known languages of the Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, currently believed to be part of the Atlantic-African language group (part of the Niger-Congo family), will never be documented; they disappeared decades ago or on the verge of extinction.

For instance, although the Hausa people speak an 'Afro-Asiatic' language, they have little or no Eurasian element in their genetic profile while the Fulani who speak a Niger-Congo language have substantial Eurasian elements in their gene pool.'

Swahili is a Bantu language and it belongs to the Niger-Congo language group.

Kofi Yakpo and Adrienne Bruyn show that Sranan locative constructions were modeled on a Niger-Congo substrate but also retain lexifier features and have undergone contact-induced and language-internal change.