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The Niger–Congo homeland is the area inhabited by speakers of the Niger–Congo languages, which has as its subfamily the Benue–Congo languages, which in turn includes the Bantu languages. ==Origin== The language family probably originated in or near the area where these languages were spoken prior to Bantu expansion (i. e., West Africa or Central Africa) and probably predated the Bantu expansion of c. 3000 BC by many thousands of years.〔Jared Diamond, "Guns, Germs and Steel" (2000)〕 Its expansion may have been associated with the expansion of Sahel agriculture in the African Neolithic period.〔 According to linguist Roger Blench, as of 2004, all specialists in Niger–Congo languages believe the languages to have a common origin, rather than merely constituting a typological classification, for reasons including their shared noun-class system, their shared verbal extensions and their shared basic lexicon.〔Blench, Roger, Unpublished Working Draft http://www.rogerblench.info/Language/Niger-Congo/BC/General/Benue-Congo%20classification%20latest.pdf〕〔See also Bendor-Samuel, J. ed. 1989. The Niger–Congo Languages. Lanham: University Press of America.〕 Similar classifications have been made ever since Diedrich Westermann in 1922.〔Westermann, D. 1922a. Die Sprache der Guang. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.〕 Joseph Greenberg continued that tradition making it the starting point for modern linguistic classification in Africa, with some of his most notable publications going to press starting in the 1960s.〔Greenberg, J.H. 1964. Historical inferences from linguistic research in sub-Saharan Africa. Boston University Papers in African History, 1:1–15.〕 But, there has been active debate for many decades over the appropriate subclassifications of the languages in that language family, which is a key tool used in localizing a language's place of origin.〔 No definitive "Proto-Niger–Congo" lexicon or grammar has been developed for the language family as a whole. An important unresolved issue in determining the time and place where the Niger–Congo languages originated and their range prior to recorded history is this language family's relationship to the Kordofanian languages spoken now spoken in the Nuba mountains of Sudan, which is not contiguous with the remainder of the Niger–Congo language speaking region and is at the northeasternmost extent of the current Niger–Congo linguistic region. The current prevailing linguistic view is that Kordofanian languages are part of the Niger–Congo language family, and that these may be the first of the many languages still spoken in that region to have been spoken in the region.〔Herman Bell. 1995. The Nuba Mountains: Who Spoke What in 1976?. (The published results from a major project of the Institute of African and Asian Studies: the Language Survey of the Nuba Mountains.)〕 The evidence is insufficient to determine if this outlier group of Niger–Congo language speakers represent a prehistoric range of a Niger–Congo linguistic region that has since contracted as other languages have intruded, or if instead, this represents a group of Niger–Congo language speakers who migrated to the area at some point in prehistory where they were an isolated linguistic community from the beginning. However, there is more agreement regarding the place of origin of the Benue–Congo subfamily of languages, which is the largest subfamily of the group, and the place of origin of the Bantu languages and the time at which it started to expand is known with great specificity. The classification of the relatively divergent family of Ubangian languages which are centered in the Central African Republic, as part of the Niger–Congo language family where Greenberg classified them in 1963 and subsequently scholars concurred,〔Williamson, Kay & Blench, Roger (2000) 'Niger–Congo', in Heine, Bernd & Nurse, Derek (eds.) African languages: an introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.〕 was called into question, by linguist Gerrit Dimmendaal in a 2008 article.〔Gerrit Dimmendaal (2008) "Language Ecology and Linguistic Diversity on the African Continent", Language and Linguistics Compass 2/5:841.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Niger–Congo homeland」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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