A very large linguistic family in (duh) north western Africa. It has about 1,436 sub-languages, and is considered the root of "Ebonics," or Standard African American English.

A branch of the Niger-Kordofanian phylum, whose languages are spoken by around 180 million people on the west coast of Africa and down through the southern part of the continent. Niger-Congo includes the Bantu languages (Swahili, Shona, Sotho, Xhosa, Zulu, Tsonga, etc.), as well as languages such as Wolof and Mandinka.

source: A Guide to the World's Languages, Vol. 1: Classification, by Merritt Ruhlen