The evidence linking Dogon to the Niger–Congo family is mainly a few numerals and some common core vocabulary.

Various theories have been proposed, placing them with Gur, Mande, or as an independent branch, the last now being the preferred approach.

The Dogon languages show very few remnants of the noun class system characteristic of much of Niger–Congo, leading linguists to conclude that they likely diverged from Niger–Congo very early.

[citation needed] Roger Blench comments,[1] Dogon is both lexically and structurally very different from most other [Niger–Congo] families.

It lacks the noun-classes usually regarded as typical of Niger–Congo and has a word order (SOV) that resembles Mande and Ịjọ, but not the other branches.

As a consequence, the ancestor of Dogon is likely to have diverged very early, although the present-day languages probably reflect an origin some 3–4000 years ago.