A language family of central Africa, with members in the Central African Republic, Chad, Cameroon, and adjoining areas of Nigeria, Congo (Kinshasa), and Congo (Brazzaville). Its name comes from the Adamawa Massif, a mountainous region between Cameroon and Nigeria, and the Ubangi River, the southern border of the CAR.

There are no well-known members of the family; main national languages include Gbaya and Banda in the Central African Republic and Zande in Congo (Kinshasa), and the Central African lingua franca called Sango. The (over-precise) Ethnologue database distinguishes 157 Adamawa-Ubangi languages. There are perhaps 4 million speakers altogether.

The group was proposed by Joseph Greenberg in his classification of African languages of around 1960, under the name Adamawa-Eastern, pas a branch of the pan-African Niger-Kordofanian superfamily. In 1971 Samarin proposed the name Adamawa-Ubangi, which seems to be accepted now.

Typology: SVO or SOV, prepositional, NG (GN in one), NA (AN in some Ubangi).

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