Splitting up Kordofanian

Abstract

Kordofanian is conventionally defined as four groups of languages spoken in the Nuba Mountains of Kordofan, southwest of Khartoum in the Sudan (Schadeberg 1989). The inclusion of Kordofanian within Niger-Congo (Greenberg 1963: 149ff.) has scarcely been questioned, although Greenberg (1972: 190) later said that 'grammatical' features had played a great role in this classification. He says: 'It is not too much to state that in at least one instance, that of Niger-Kordofanian, grammatical resemblances were treated as more decisive than lexical ones.' This suggests that Greenberg relied more on typological features than on, for example, cognate lexicon. The sources of much of Greenberg's data were the studies of Nuba Mountain languages by Stevenson (1956-1957, 1962-1964). Stevenson included one group of languages not generally considered to be Kordofanian today, the Kadu languages (= Tumtum, Kadugli-Krongo).