[citation needed] Within Niger–Congo, the Bantu languages alone account for 350 million people (2015), or half the total Niger–Congo speaking population.

The most widely spoken Niger–Congo languages by number of native speakers are Yoruba, Igbo, Fula, Lingala, Ewe, Fon, Ga-Dangme, Shona, Sesotho, Xhosa, Zulu, Akan, and Mooré.

The most widely spoken by the total number of speakers is Swahili, which is used as a lingua franca in parts of eastern and southeastern Africa.

[2] While the ultimate genetic unity of the core of Niger–Congo (called Atlantic–Congo) is widely accepted, the internal cladistic structure is not well established.

The connection of the Mande languages especially has never been demonstrated, and without them, the validity of Niger–Congo family as a whole (as opposed to Atlantic–Congo or a similar subfamily) has not been established.

Blench (2004), relying particularly on prior work by Kay Williamson and P. De Wolf, argued that Benue–Congo probably originated at the confluence of the Benue and Niger Rivers in central Nigeria.

[20] The Bantu expansion, beginning around 1000 BC, swept across much of Central and Southern Africa, leading to the assimilation and extinction of many of the indigenous Pygmy and Bushmen (Khoisan) populations there.

Benue–Congo includes the Southern Bantoid group, which is dominated by the Bantu languages, which account for 350 million people (2015), or half the total Niger–Congo speaking population.

For example, Roger Blench (2012) argued that Adamawa, Ubangian, Kwa, Bantoid, and Bantu are not coherent groups.

Glottolog also considers Ijoid, Mande, and Dogon to be independent language phyla that have not been demonstrated to be related to each other.

In this period a relation between Bantu and languages with Bantu-like (but less complete) noun class systems began to emerge.

The Bantuist Meinhof made a major distinction between Bantu and a 'Semi-Bantu' group which according to him was originally of the unrelated Sudanic stock.

In a series of articles published between 1949 and 1954, he argued that Westermann's 'West Sudanic' and Bantu formed a single genetic family, which he named Niger–Congo; that Bantu constituted a subgroup of the Benue–Congo branch; that Adamawa-Eastern, previously not considered to be related, was another member of this family; and that Fula belonged to the West Atlantic languages.

Just before these articles were collected in final book form (The Languages of Africa) in 1963, he amended his classification by adding Kordofanian as a branch co-ordinate with Niger–Congo as a whole; consequently, he renamed the family Congo-Kordofanian, later Niger–Kordofanian.

Greenberg's work on African languages, though initially greeted with scepticism, became the prevailing view among scholars.

[19] Bennet and Sterk (1977) presented an internal reclassification based on lexicostatistics that laid the foundation for the regrouping in Bendor-Samuel (1989).

Kordofanian was presented as one of several primary branches rather than being coordinate to the family as a whole, prompting re-introduction of the term Niger–Congo, which is in current use among linguists.

Likewise, Mande is often assumed to be the second-most distant branch based on its lack of the noun-class system prototypical of the Niger–Congo family.

Pozdniakov (2012) stated: "The hypothesis of kinship between Niger–Congo languages didn't appear as a result of discovery of numerous related forms, for example, in Mande and Adamawa.

They list the following as separate families: Atlantic–Congo, Mande, Dogon, Ijoid, Lafofa, Katla-Tima, Heiban, Talodi, and Rashad.

Most scholars have focused on individual families or groups, and classifications as well as reconstructions were made on lower levels.

Compared with the volume of literature on Atlantic or Mande languages, the list of papers considering the aspects of Niger–Congo reconstruction per se is quite scarce.

"[28] Oxford Handbooks Online (2016) has indicated that the continuing reassessment of Niger–Congo's "internal structure is due largely to the preliminary nature of Greenberg's classification, explicitly based as it was on a methodology that doesn't produce proofs for genetic affiliations between languages but rather aims at identifying "likely candidates.

"...The ongoing descriptive and documentary work on individual languages and their varieties, greatly expanding our knowledge on formerly little-known linguistic regions, is helping to identify clusters and units that allow for the application of the historical-comparative method.

Only the reconstruction of lower-level units, instead of "big picture" contributions based on mass comparison, can help to verify (or disprove) our present concept of Niger–Congo as a genetic grouping consisting of Benue–Congo plus Volta–Niger, Kwa, Adamawa plus Gur, Kru, the so-called Kordofanian languages, and probably the language groups traditionally classified as Atlantic.

"[31] Good (2020) stated: "First proposed by Greenberg (1949), Niger–Congo (NC) has for decades been treated as one of the four major phyla of African languages.

On the other hand, the term is also intended to embody a hypothesis of genealogical relationship between the referential NC languages that has not been proven.

A more recent proponent was Roger Blench (1995), who puts forward phonological, morphological and lexical evidence for uniting Niger–Congo and Nilo-Saharan in a Niger–Saharan phylum, with special affinity between Niger–Congo and Central Sudanic.

A subject-verb-object word order is quite widespread among today's Niger–Congo languages, but SOV is found in branches as divergent as Mande, Ijoid and Dogon.

The major exceptions are found in the western[50] areas where verb-final word order predominates and genitives precede nouns, though other modifiers still come afterwards.