ABSTRACT
The first notes on the Tiv language (dzwa Tiv) were made by Koelle about 1850 from liberated slaves in Sierra Leone. Johnston classified it as peculiar to itself among the Semi-Bantu languages; Talbot concurred. Abraham, who has made the most complete linguistic study of Tiv, classes it as Bantu, stating that its vocabulary is more closely related to the Nyanza group of Bantu languages in East Africa than to Ekoi or other West African semi-Bantu languages-the most closely related language in Nigeria being Jar. Malherbe agrees that Tiv is basically Bantu. In Greenberg's recent classification, Tiv forms a sub-division of the Niger-Congo family of languages.
