The forty or so Plateau languages are a tentative group of Benue–Congo languages spoken by 15 million people on the Jos Plateau, Southern Kaduna, Nasarawa State and in adjacent areas in central Nigeria. Berom and Eggon have the most speakers. Most Plateau languages are threatened and have around 2,000-10,000 speakers. Defining features of the Plateau family have only been published in manuscript form (Blench 2008). Many of the languages have highly elaborate phonology systems that make comparison with poor data difficult.

Branches and locations

Below is a list of major Plateau branches and their primary locations (centres of diversity) based on Blench (2019). The Plateau languages are highly typologically and lexically diverse. For instance, Roger Blench (2022) notes that Beromic is more internally diverse than all of West Chadic A3.

Classification

Little work has been done on the Plateau languages, and the results to date are tentative.

Blench (2018)

Blench (2018:112) gives the following classification of the Plateau languages.

Blench (2008)

The following classification is taken from Blench (2008). Most of the branches are discrete constituents, though Central is a residual grouping and there are doubts about some of the purported Ninzic languages. Plateau languages as a whole share a number of isoglosses, as do all branches apart from Tarokoid. Glottolog adds the Yukubenic languages. Blench, however, places Yukubenic in the Jukunoid family, following Shimizu (1980).

Gerhardt (1983)

Classification of Plateau languages by Gerhardt (1983), based on Maddieson (1972): Note: Plateau 1 languages, consisting of Plateau 1a and 1b, are now classified separately as Kainji languages.

Language list

List of Plateau languages given by Blench (2018): Nisam is a presumed Plateau language once spoken in Nince Village, Kaduna State, but its place within the Plateau branch cannot be ascertained due to the lack of linguistic data. In 2005, there was only one speaker of Nisam.

Morphology

Proto-Plateau nominal prefixes: Only some of the languages have nominal classes, as the Bantu languages have, where in others these have eroded. In many Plateau languages, many CV- prefixes have become fossilised, replaced by V- prefixes, or disappeared altogether. The large numbers of consonants in many languages is due to the erosion of noun-class prefixes. In Plateau languages, adjectives and possessive forms generally follow the noun.

Reconstructions

Some Proto-Plateau quasi-reconstructions proposed by Roger Blench (2008) are:

Numerals

Comparison of numerals in individual languages:

Footnotes