التيفية

Tiv is the principal language of the Tiv ethnic group, the largest non-Hausa-Fulani population of central Nigeria, with ~5 million speakers concentrated in Benue State around Gboko and Makurdi. Linguistically, Tiv belongs to the Tivoid subgroup of Bantoid (sister branch to the Bantu languages), but most other Tivoid languages are in Cameroon, making Tiv geographically isolated within its subgroup. Tiv has classical Niger-Congo features: noun-class system (~10 classes), tonal (3 tones with downstep), and SVO constituent order. The Abraham 1940 Tiv-English Dictionary remains a foundational reference. Tiv has a strong literary tradition since the 1930s, with major works including the Tiv New Testament (1936) and the Tiv-language newspaper "Tion".