Senegambian Languages - Classification

Classification

Sapir (1971) proposed a West Atlantic branch of the Niger–Congo languages that included a Northern branch largely synonymous with Senegambian. However, Sapir's West Atlantic and its branches turned out to be geographic and typological rather than genealogical groups. The only investigation since then, Segerer (2010), removed the Bak languages from Sapir's Northern West Atlantic but found that the remaining languages, Senegambian (Serer–Fulani–Wolof), to be a valid group, characterized by consonant mutation:

The Fula–Tenda languages all have implosive consonants, while Serer and Fula share noun-class suffixes. Several classifications, including the one used by Ethnologue 17, show Fula as being more closely related to Wolof than it is to Serer. However, this is due to a misreading of Sapir's data by Wilson (1989).