Ijaw Languages

Ijaw Languages

The Ijaw, also spelled Ịjọ, languages are spoken in southern Nigeria by the Ijaw people. They form a divergent branch of the Niger–Congo family (perhaps along with Defaka in a group called Ijoid), and are noted for their subject–object–verb basic word order, which is otherwise an unusual feature in Niger–Congo, shared only by such distant potential branches as Mande and Dogon. Like Mande and Dogon, Ijoid lacks even traces of the noun class system considered characteristic of Niger–Congo, and so may have split early from that family.

Berbice Creole Dutch, a creole spoken in Guyana, has a lexicon based partly on an Ịjọ language, perhaps the ancestor of Kalabari (Kouwenberg 1994).