Niger–Congo languages

High school (ages 12+)
People & Society

Name:

Date:

Step 1 · Read the article

Open the article and read it at the level above. Then answer the questions below in your own words.

https://smallwhale.org/articles/niger-congo-languages

Write what each word means, using the article.

Do not copy the article. Write two things you learned, the way you would explain them to a friend.

Answers below are taken from the article’s stored facts, so they match what the student read.

1. What is the estimated number of languages?Approximately 1,500 languages
2. What is the estimated time of proto-language origin?Around 10,000 years ago
3. What are Niger-Congo languages?They are a huge family of languages spoken by more than 1.5 billion people across sub‑Saharan Africa, like a big tree with many branches.
4. How many languages are in the Niger-Congo family?About 1,500 different languages belong to this family.

Macrofamily: A very large grouping of language families believed to have a common ancestral origin.
Comparative Linguistics: The study of relationships between languages by comparing their features to reconstruct their history.
Agreement: A grammatical phenomenon where a word changes its form to match another word in the sentence.
Historical Linguistics: The study of how languages change over time and their historical relationships.