Niger–Congo languages

The Niger–Congo languages are a hypothetical language family. They are spoken in the southern half of Africa.  They may be world's largest language family in terms of number of languages.  Most of the most widely spoken languages of Subsaharan Africa belong to this group.  A common part of many Niger-Congo languages is the use of a noun class system. The most widely spoken Niger-Congo languages by native speakers are Yoruba, Igbo, Fula and Shona. The most widely spoken by total number of speakers is Swahili.


References
Williamson, Kay (1989) 'Niger-Congo overview', in Bendor-Samuel & Hartell (eds.) The Niger-Congo Languages, 3-45.
Williamson, Kay & Blench, Roger (2000) 'Niger-Congo', in Heine, Bernd and Nurse, Derek (eds) African Languages - An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 11–42.

Other websites
 An Evaluation of Niger-Congo Classification , Kenneth Olson
 Ethnologue: Niger-Congo Family Tree
 The LINGUIST List MultiTree Project: Niger-Congo Family Trees