Lafofa languages

Lafofa, also Tegem–Amira, is a dialect cluster spoken in the southern Nuba Mountains in the south of Sudan. Blench (2010) considers the Tegem and Amira varieties to be distinct languages; as Lafofa is poorly attested, there may be others.

Lafofa
Kidie Lafofa
Native to	Sudan
Region	Nuba Hills
Ethnicity	Lafofa
Native speakers	30,000 (2023)[1]
Language family	Niger–Congo? Kordofanian Talodi Tegem Lafofa
Dialects	Tegem Amira
Language codes
ISO 639-3	laf
Glottolog	lafo1243
ELP	Lafofa
Lafofa is classified as Severely Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger

Greenberg (1950) classified Lafofa as one of the Talodi languages, albeit a divergent one, but without much evidence. More recently this position has been abandoned, and Lafofa is left unclassified within Niger–Congo. Norton (2016) tentatively finds Lafofa to be closest to the Ijoid languages.^[2] It is considered a language isolate by Glottolog.

Unlike the neighbouring Talodi-Heiban languages which have SVO word order, the Lafofa languages have SOV word order.^[3]

See also

• Lafofa word lists (Wiktionary)

References

1. Lafofa at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024)
2. Russell Norton, 'Lafofa: a distant Ijoid-related language'. CLAN 2016
3. Güldemann, Tom (2018). "Historical linguistics and genealogical language classification in Africa". In Güldemann, Tom (ed.). The Languages and Linguistics of Africa. The World of Linguistics series. Vol. 11. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 58–444. doi:10.1515/9783110421668-002. ISBN 978-3-11-042606-9. S2CID 133888593.

• Roger Blench, 2011 (ms), "Does Kordofanian constitute a group and if not, where does its languages fit into Niger-Congo?"
• Roger Blench, 2011 (ms), "Tegem–Amira: a previously unrecognised subgroup of Niger–Congo"