Dogon

The Dogon languages form a small family of about a dozen languages spoken by the Dogon people along the Bandiagara Escarpment south of the Niger bend in central Mali, with some speakers in Burkina Faso. Their place within the proposed Niger-Congo family is uncertain, and they are often treated as an independent branch; the nearby Bangime language is regarded as an isolate.

They are tonal languages with a subject-object-verb word order, and the varieties of the escarpment and the plains are often mutually unintelligible. From around the eleventh century the Dogon withdrew from Muslim-ruled lands into the defensible cliff country, and by the 1400s they had reached the Sanga region; their speech preserves the divisions of these migrant groups.