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Niger-Congo languages - Britannica Concise
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Family of some 1,400 languages of Africa.

All of these are considered to be distinct languages and not simply dialects. The named dialects of these languages number many thousands more, not to mention the variant names for those languages and dialects. Niger-Congo languages are spoken by about 85% of the population of Africa, from Dakar, Senegal, in the west to Mombasa, Kenya, and in the east and south to Cape Town, S.Af. The name Niger-Congo was introduced in 1955 by Joseph H. Greenberg. As understood today, Niger-Congo has nine branches: Mande, Kordofanian, Atlantic (formerly West Atlantic), Kru, Gur, Kwa, Ijoid, Adamawa-Ubangi (formerly Adamawa-Eastern), and Benue-Congo.

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Niger-Congo languages: distribution of Niger-Congo languagesNiger-Congo languages: Niger-Congo language family
More on "Niger-Congo languages" from Britannica Concise:
Benue-Congo languages - Largest branch of the Niger-Congo language family, both in numbers of languages (900) and speakers (at least 500 million).
Gur languages - Branch of the huge Niger-Congo language family.
Atlantic languages - Branch of the Niger-Congo language family.
Adamawa-Ubangi languages - Branch of the huge Niger-Congo language family.
Kordofanian languages - Branch of the Niger-Congo language family.
More on "Niger-Congo languages" from the 32 Volume Encyclopædia Britannica:
Niger-Congo languages - a family of languages of Africa, which in terms of the number of languages spoken, their geographic extent, and the number of speakers is by far the largest language family in Africa. The area in which these languages are spoken stretches from Dakar, Senegal, at the westernmost tip of the continent, east to Mombasa in Kenya and south to Cape Town, South Africa. Excluding northern Africa ...
Benue-Congo languages - the largest branch of the Niger-Congo language family, in terms of the number of speakers, the number of languages, and the wide geographic spread, stretching from the Benin-Nigeria border across Nigeria and Cameroon through central Africa to eastern Africa. It includes all the countries in central and southern Africa. This huge area covers more than half the habitable terrain of the continent ...
Gur languages - a branch of the Niger-Congo language family comprising some 85 languages that are spoken by approximately 20 million people in the savanna lands north of the forest belt that runs from southeastern Mali across northern Cote d'Ivoire, through much of Burkina Faso, to all of northern Ghana, Togo, and Benin. Moore, which is spoken by some five million people, is the most widely used language of the ...
Kadu languages - group of related languages spoken along the western and southern edge of the Nuba Hills in The Sudan. These languages were formerly classified as part of the Kordofanian group within the Niger-Congo language family, but they are now widely believed to form a subgroup within the Nilo-Saharan language family. The name Kadu is based on a widespread word for "people" in the languages of this group. ...
Atlantic languages - branch of the Niger-Congo language family spoken primarily in Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. The approximately 45 Atlantic languages are spoken by about 30 million people. One language cluster, Fula (also called Fulani, Peul, Fulfulde, and Toucouleur), accounts for more than half of this number and is the most widely scattered language group in Africa, ...
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