The Ijoid languages are spoken by the Ịjọ (Ijaw) and Defaka peoples of the Niger Delta, who number about ten million. The most populous language by far is Izon, with about a million speakers, followed by Okrike-Kalabari with over a half million. The family is generally divided in two branches, Ịjọ and Defaka. The Ijo branch consists of the about nine Ịjọ languages. Defaka, a tiny endangered language of the Bonny area, forms a branch on its own.

The Ijoid languages form a branch of the Niger–Congo family and are noted for their subject–object–verb basic word order, which is otherwise an unusual feature in Niger–Congo, shared only by such distant branches as Mande and Dogon. Like Mande and Dogon, Ijoid lacks even traces of the noun class system considered characteristic of Niger–Congo, and so may have split early from that family.