Dialect cluster of the Nuba Mountains of southern Sudan
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
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.
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]
^Lafofa at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024)
^Russell Norton, 'Lafofa: a distant Ijoid-related language'. CLAN 2016
^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.
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