The Dogon languages are spoken by the Dogon of Mali. There are about 600,000 speakers of a dozen languages. They are tonal languages, most like Dogul having two tones, some like Donno So having three.

The place of Dogon inside the Niger–Congo family is not clear, and the evidence linking them to Niger–Congo is weak. Various theories have been proposed, placing them in Gur, Mande, or as an independent branch, the last now being the preferred theory. The Dogon languages show no remnants of the noun class system characteristic of much of Niger–Congo, leading linguists to conclude that they likely diverged from Niger–Congo very early. The basic word order is subject–object–verb.

Roger Blench comments,

The Bamana and Fula languages have exerted significant influence on Dogon, due to their close cultural and geographical ties.

The Dogon consider themselves a single ethnic group, but recognize that their languages are different. In Dogon cosmology, Dogon constitutes six of the twelve languages of the world (the others being Fulfulde, Mooré, Bambara, Bozo, and Tamasheq). Jamsay is thought to be the original Dogon language, but the Dogon "recognise a myriad of tiny distinctions even between parts of villages and sometimes individuals, and strive to preserve these." (Hochstetler 2004:18)