Adamawa-Eastern languages

In the very center of Africa lies a group of Niger-Congo languages separated from related languages in the west by a wedge of Benue-Congo languages that reaches northward from the Congo republics into the Central African Republic, the Cameroun Republic, and Nigeria. The group, taken to be a linguistic unit, a subphylum of Niger-Congo by Greenberg (1963), has an east-west distribution that reaches from the Cameroun to the Sudan and includes both the southeastern portion of the Chad and the northern portion of the Congo Republic (Kinshasa), with the Central African Republic representing most of its territorial expanse. This group of languages actually consists of at least two subgroups : Adamawa, located principally in the Cameroun (in the general area of the Adamawa mountains), but spilling over into the adjoining parts of Nigeria, the Chad, and the C.A.R. ; and Eastern, so-called because these languages once were considered to represent the eastern extension of Sudanic languages. Hence, Adamawa-Eastern.2 Murdock (1959) uses the term Eastern Nigritic instead, but his classification is not taken very seriously by linguists