# Transplanted African languages  
The areas where slaves were sourced are characterized by extensive multilingualism. The majority of languages spoken belong to the Niger-Congo trunk, one of the four linguistic trunks ${ }^{2}$ among which the two thousand plus African languages are distributed. This trunk brings together languages of the West Africa area and southern area: ${ }^{3}$
(a) In the West Africa area, there is greater diversity, with different groups, such as Atlantic, which includes languages like Fula (Fulfulde), Wolof, Manjaco and Balanta; Mande (Mandingo), with the Bambara, Maninca and Dioula languages; Kwa (Gbe subgroup), with the Eve, Fon, Gen and Aja languages (referred to in Brazil by the term Jeje) and Benue-Congo, in which the Defoide group is found, which includes the Yoruba languages, referred to in Brazil by the term Nagô-Queto and in Cuba by the term Anago/Lucumí.
(b) In the southern area, the languages belong essentially to the Bantu subgroup - limited to the west coast (nowadays the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola) and, in the case of Brazil, only later extended to the east coast (Mozambique). It is characterized by a smaller number of languages - typologically homogeneous, but spoken by the greatest number of captives. Among others, these include Quicongo, Quivíli, Iuoio (Fiote), Quiombe, Quimbundo, Chôcue, Umbundo, Luba and Macua.
Faced with such diversity, one topic of interest for scholars concerns the way in which African peoples and languages have interacted with the languages of the Indigenous populations, as well as those of the colonizers, in the Latin American continent, along with the impact of their languages on the language imposed by  
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[^0]:    2 According to the current genetic classification of the languages of Africa, in addition to Niger-Congo which has the largest number of languages - there are three other linguistic trunks: Afroasiatic, Khoisan and Nilo-Saharan (Heine and Nurse, 2000).