Nilo-Saharan languages

The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50–60 million Nilotic people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet. The languages extend through 17 nations in the northern half of Africa: from Algeria to Benin in west; from Libya to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the center; and from Egypt to Tanzania in the east.

Eight of its proposed constituent divisions (excluding Kunama, Kuliak, and Songhay) are found in the modern two nations of Sudan and South Sudan, through which the Nile River flows. As indicated by its hyphenated name, Nilo-Saharan is a family of the African interior, including the greater Nile basin and the central Sahara desert.

Joseph Greenberg named the group and argued it was a genetic family in his 1963 book The Languages of Africa. It contains the languages not included in the Niger–Congo, Afroasiatic, or Khoisan families. It has not been demonstrated that the Nilo-Saharan languages constitute a valid genetic grouping, and linguists have generally seen the phylum as "Greenberg's wastebasket", into which he placed all the otherwise unaffiliated non-click languages of Africa. Its supporters accept that it is a challenging proposal to demonstrate, but contend that it looks more promising the more work is done.

Languages of Africa

There are 1,250 to 2,100 and by some counts over 3,000 languages spoken natively in Africa, in several major language families:

There are several other small families and language isolates, as well as obscure languages that have yet to be classified. In addition, Africa has a wide variety of sign languages, many of which are language isolates.

About a hundred of the languages of Africa are widely used for inter-ethnic communication. Arabic, Somali, Berber, Amharic, Oromo, Swahili, Hausa, Manding, Igbo, Fulani and Yoruba are spoken by tens of millions of people. If clusters of up to a hundred similar languages are counted together, twelve are spoken by 75 percent, and fifteen by 85 percent, of Africans as a first or additional language.

Nilotic peoples

Nilotic peoples are peoples indigenous to the Nile Valley that speak Nilotic languages, which comprise a large sub-group of the Nilo-Saharan languages and are spoken in South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, and northern Tanzania and including Masai. The Nilotic peoples include the Luo, Kalenjin, Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, Ateker, and the Maa-speaking peoples, each of which is a cluster of several ethnic groups.

Nilotes form the majority of the population in South Sudan, which is believed to be their original point of dispersal. They also constitute the second-largest group of peoples inhabiting the African Great Lakes region (after the Bantu peoples), with a notable presence in southwestern Ethiopia as well.

Nilotes primarily adhere to Christianity and traditional faiths, including the Dinka religion.

Name

The terms Nilotic and Nilote were previously used as racial sub-classifications, based on anthropological observations of the distinct body morphology of many Nilotic speakers. These perceptions were later widely discarded by 20th century social-scientists, but today they again find support in population genetics.

Christopher Ehret

Christopher Ehret (born July 27, 1941), who currently holds the position of Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, is an American scholar of African history and African historical linguistics particularly known for his efforts to correlate linguistic taxonomy and reconstruction with the archeological record. He has published ten books, most recently History and the Testimony of Language (2011) and A Dictionary of Sandawe (2012), the latter co-edited with his wife, Patricia Ehret. He has written around seventy scholarly articles on a wide range of historical, linguistic, and anthropological subjects. These works include monographic articles on Bantu subclassification; on internal reconstruction in Semitic; on the reconstruction of proto-Cushitic and proto-Eastern Cushitic; and, with Mohamed Nuuh Ali, on the classification of the Soomaali languages. He has also contributed to a number of encyclopedias on African topics and on world history.