The Niger–Congo languages are a hypothetical language family. They are spoken in the southern half of Africa. They may be world's largest language family in terms of number of languages. Most of the most widely spoken languages of Subsaharan Africa belong to this group. A common part of many Niger-Congo languages is the use of a noun class system. The most widely spoken Niger-Congo languages by native speakers are Yoruba, Igbo, Fula and Shona. The most widely spoken by total number of speakers is Swahili.