The forty or so Plateau languages are a tentative group of Benue–Congo languages spoken by 15 million people on the Jos Plateau, Southern Kaduna, Nasarawa State and in adjacent areas in central Nigeria.^{[citation needed]}

Berom and Eggon have the most speakers. Most Plateau languages are threatened and have around 2,000-10,000 speakers.^[1]

Defining features of the Plateau family have only been published in manuscript form (Blench 2008). Many of the languages have highly elaborate phonology systems that make comparison with poor data difficult.

Below is a list of major Plateau branches and their primary locations (centres of diversity) based on Blench (2019).^[2]

The Plateau languages are highly typologically and lexically diverse. For instance, Roger Blench (2022) notes that Beromic is more internally diverse than all of West Chadic A3.^[3]

Little work has been done on the Plateau languages, and the results to date are tentative.

List of Plateau languages given by Blench (2018):^[4]

Nisam is a presumed Plateau language once spoken in Nince Village, Kaduna State, but its place within the Plateau branch cannot be ascertained due to the lack of linguistic data. In 2005, there was only one speaker of Nisam.^[11]

Proto-Plateau nominal prefixes:^[4]

• *ni- (corresponding to Bantu noun class 9 *n- for animals and inanimate objects)
• *V- for person, *bV- for people
• *N- prefixes, homorganic with the following consonant
• *nV- ~ *mV- (both singular and plural), which mark liquids, mass nouns, and abstract nouns

Only some of the languages have nominal classes, as the Bantu languages have, where in others these have eroded. In many Plateau languages, many CV- prefixes have become fossilised, replaced by V- prefixes, or disappeared altogether.^[4] The large numbers of consonants in many languages is due to the erosion of noun-class prefixes.

In Plateau languages, adjectives and possessive forms generally follow the noun.

Some Proto-Plateau quasi-reconstructions proposed by Roger Blench (2008) are:

Comparison of numerals in individual languages:^[12]

• List of Plateau reconstructions (Wiktionary)
• Systematic graphic of the Niger–Congo language family