Map showing the distribution of the Nilo-Saharan languages.
The Nilo-Saharan languages are a group of African languages spoken mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including Nubia. Roughly 11 million people spoke Nilo-Saharan languages as of 1987, according to Merritt Ruhlen's estimate. The family is internally extremely diverse - far more so than Indo-European, or even Afro-Asiatic - and is somewhat controversial, with some linguists denying its validity.
According to Joseph H. Greenberg as initially modified by Lionel Bender (and adopted by the Ethnologue), they are classified into the following branches:
Some linguists, including Roger Blench, consider the Kadu languages (also called Kadugli languages or Tumtum) to be Nilo-Saharan, while others follow Greenberg in classing them as Kordofanian languages, or Ehret in considering them a small isolated family.
The extinct Meroitic language of ancient Kush has sometimes been suggested as a probable member of Nilo-Saharan; however, too little is known of the language to classify it with any confidence. The same may reasonably be said of the rather more recently extinct Oropom language in Uganda, for whom connections with Kuliak or Nilotic have been suggested.
Languages of the Berber branch of the Afro-Asiatic family are spoken by a substantial portion of the population in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia; by scattered groups elsewhere in North Africa; and along the southern fringes of the Sahara Desert in western Africa.
The Nubian alphabet was derived from that of the Coptic language.
Languages spoken farther to the south-east, including Maasai in Kenya, have long been called Nilo-Hamitic; recent investigations, however, appear to prove that these tongues have no direct relationship to languages of the Afro-Asiatic family, but are most closely related to the Niloticlanguages.
Languages in the largest of the six subgroups, Nilotic, are spoken along the Nile and Chari rivers.
Languages of South African Khoisan, which include Nama and Naron, are spoken in and around the Kalahari Desert of northern South Africa, southwestern Botswana, and Namibia.
Languages of East African Khoisan include Sandawe and Hadza, both of which are spoken in Tanzania.
Feeds |
Contact