Distribution of Nilo-Saharan languages (in yellow)
TheNilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of around 210African languages[1] spoken by somewhere around 70 million speakers,[1] mainly in the upper parts of theChari andNile rivers, including historicNubia, north of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet. The languages extend through 17 nations in the northern half of Africa: fromAlgeria toBenin in the west; fromLibya to theDemocratic Republic of the Congo in the centre; and fromEgypt toTanzania in the east.
As indicated by its hyphenated name, Nilo-Saharan is a family of the African interior, including the greater Nile Basin and the CentralSahara Desert. Most of its proposed constituent divisions are found in the modern countries ofSudan andSouth Sudan, through which the Nile River flows.
In his bookThe Languages of Africa (1963),Joseph Greenberg named the group and argued it was agenetic family. It contained all the languages that were not included in theNiger–Congo,Afroasiatic orKhoisan families. Although some linguists have referred to the phylum as "Greenberg'swastebasket", into which he placed all the otherwise unaffiliated non-click languages of Africa,[3][4] other specialists in the field have accepted it as a working hypothesis since Greenberg's classification.[5] Linguists[who?] accept that it is a challenging proposal to demonstrate but contend that it looks more promising the more work is done.[6][7][8]
Some of the constituent groups of Nilo-Saharan are estimated to predate theAfrican neolithic. For example, the unity ofEastern Sudanic is estimated to date to at least the 5th millennium BC.[9] Nilo-Saharan genetic unity would thus be much older still and date to the lateUpper Paleolithic. The earliest written language associated with the Nilo-Saharan family isOld Nubian, one of the oldest written African languages, attested in writing from the 8th to the 15th century AD.
Nilo-Saharan is not accepted by all linguists.Glottolog (2013), for example, a publication of theMax Planck Institute in Germany, does not recognise the unity of the Nilo-Saharan family or even of the Eastern Sudanic branch;Georgiy Starostin (2016) likewise does not accept a relationship between the branches of Nilo-Saharan, though he leaves open the possibility that some of them may prove to be related to each other once the necessaryreconstructive work is done. According to Güldemann (2018), "the current state of research is not sufficient to prove the Nilo-Saharan hypothesis."[10]
Within the Nilo-Saharan languages are a number of languages with at least a million speakers (most data from SIL'sEthnologue 16 (2009)). In descending order:
Nubian (1.7 million, all dialects). The language ofNubia, extending today from southernEgypt into northernSudan. Many Nubians have also migrated northwards toCairo since the building of theAswan Dam.
The total for all speakers of Nilo-Saharan languages according toEthnologue 16 is 38–39 million people. However, the data spans a range from ca. 1980 to 2005, with a weighted median at ca. 1990. Given population growth rates, the figure in 2010 might be half again higher, or about 60 million.
The Saharan family (which includesKanuri,Kanembu, theTebu languages, andZaghawa) was recognized byHeinrich Barth in 1853, the Nilotic languages byKarl Richard Lepsius in 1880, the various constituent branches of Central Sudanic (but not the connection between them) byFriedrich Müller in 1889, and the Maban family byMaurice Gaudefroy-Demombynes in 1907. The first inklings of a wider family came in 1912, whenDiedrich Westermann included three of the (still independent) Central Sudanic families within Nilotic in a proposal he calledNiloto-Sudanic;[13] this expanded Nilotic was in turn linked to Nubian, Kunama, and possibly Berta, essentially Greenberg's Macro-Sudanic (Chari–Nile) proposal of 1954.
In 1920 G. W. Murray fleshed out the Eastern Sudanic languages when he grouped Nilotic, Nubian,Nera,Gaam, and Kunama.Carlo Conti Rossini made similar proposals in 1926, and in 1935 Westermann addedMurle. In 1940 A. N. Tucker published evidence linking five of the six branches of Central Sudanic alongside his more explicit proposal for East Sudanic. In 1950 Greenberg retained Eastern Sudanic and Central Sudanic as separate families, but accepted Westermann's conclusions of four decades earlier in 1954 when he linked them together asMacro-Sudanic (laterChari–Nile, from theChari andNile Watersheds).
Greenberg's later contribution came in 1963, when he tied Chari–Nile to Songhai, Saharan, Maban, Fur, and Koman-Gumuz and coined the current nameNilo-Saharan for the resulting family.Lionel Bender noted that Chari–Nile was an artifact of the order of European contact with members of the family and did not reflect an exclusive relationship between these languages, and the group has been abandoned, with its constituents becoming primary branches of Nilo-Saharan—or, equivalently, Chari–Nile and Nilo-Saharan have merged, with the nameNilo-Saharan retained. When it was realized that theKadu languages were not Niger–Congo, they were commonly assumed to therefore be Nilo-Saharan, but this remains somewhat controversial.
Progress has been made since Greenberg established the plausibility of the family.Koman andGumuz remain poorly attested and are difficult to work with, while arguments continue over the inclusion of Songhai. Blench (2010) believes that the distribution of Nilo-Saharan reflects the waterways of thewet Sahara 12,000 years ago, and that the protolanguage hadnoun classifiers, which today are reflected in a diverse range of prefixes, suffixes, and number marking.
Dimmendaal (2008) notes that Greenberg (1963) based his conclusion on strong evidence and that the proposal as a whole has become more convincing in the decades since. Mikkola (1999) reviewed Greenberg's evidence and found it convincing.Roger Blench notes morphological similarities in all putative branches, which leads him to believe that the family is likely to be valid.
Koman andGumuz are poorly known and have been difficult to evaluate until recently.[vague] Songhay is markedly divergent, in part due to massive influence from theMande languages.[5] Also problematic are theKuliak languages, which are spoken by hunter-gatherers and appear to retain a non-Nilo-Saharan core; Blench believes they might have been similar toHadza orDahalo and shifted incompletely to Nilo-Saharan.
Anbessa Tefera and Peter Unseth consider the poorly attestedShabo language to be Nilo-Saharan, though unclassified within the family due to lack of data; Dimmendaal and Blench, based on a more complete description, consider it to be a language isolate on current evidence. Proposals have sometimes been made to add Mande (usually included inNiger–Congo), largely due to its many noteworthy similarities with Songhay rather than with Nilo-Saharan as a whole, however this relationship is more likely due to a close relationship between Songhay and Mande many thousands of years ago in the early days of Nilo-Saharan, so the relationship is probably more one of ancient contact than a genetic link.[5]
The extinctMeroitic language of ancientKush has been accepted by linguists such as Rille, Dimmendaal, and Blench as Nilo-Saharan, though others argue for anAfroasiatic affiliation. It is poorly attested.
With the possible exception ofEastern Sudanic, there is little doubt that the constituent families of Nilo-Saharan—of which only Eastern Sudanic andCentral Sudanic show much internal diversity—are valid groups. However, there have been several conflicting classifications in grouping them together. Each of the proposed higher-order groups has been rejected by other researchers: Greenberg's Chari–Nile by Bender and Blench, and Bender's Core Nilo-Saharan by Dimmendaal and Blench. What remains are eight (Dimmendaal) to twelve (Bender) constituent families of no consensus arrangement.
Joseph Greenberg, inThe Languages of Africa, set up the family with the following branches. The Chari–Nile core are the connections that had been suggested by previous researchers.
Lionel Bender came up with a classification which expanded upon and revised that of Greenberg. He considered Fur and Maban to constitute aFur–Maban branch, addedKadu to Nilo-Saharan, removed Kuliak from Eastern Sudanic, removed Gumuz from Koman (but left it as a sister node), and chose to positKunama as an independent branch of the family. By 1991 he had added more detail to the tree, dividing Chari–Nile into nested clades, including a Core group in whichBerta was considered divergent, and coordinating Fur–Maban as a sister clade to Chari–Nile.[14][15]
Bender revised his model of Nilo-Saharan again in 1996, at which point he split Koman and Gumuz into completely separate branches of Core Nilo-Saharan.[16]
Christopher Ehret came up with a novel classification of Nilo-Saharan in 1989, though most of the evidence was not published until 2001.[17] His classification, which was not accepted by other researchers,[15] consists of two primary branches: Gumuz–Koman, and a 'Sudanic' group containing the remainder of the families. Unusually, Songhay is nested within a core group and is coordinate with Maban in a 'Western Sahelian' clade, while Kadu is excluded in Nilo-Saharan. Note that 'Koman' in this classification is equivalent toKomuz, i.e. a family with Gumuz and Koman as primary branches, and Ehret renames the traditional Koman group 'Western Koman'.
By 2000 Bender had entirely abandoned the Chari–Nile and Komuz branches. He also added Kunama back to the "Satellite–Core" group and simplified the subdivisions therein. He retracted the inclusion ofShabo, stating that it could not yet be adequately classified but might prove to be Nilo-Saharan once sufficient research has been done. This tentative and somewhat conservative classification held as a sort of standard for the next decade.[18]
Niger-Saharan, a language macrofamily linking the Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan phyla, was proposed byBlench (2006).[19] It was not accepted by other linguists. Blench's (2006) internal classification of the Niger-Saharan macrophylum is as follows:
With a better understanding of Nilo-Saharan classifiers, and the affixes or number marking they have developed into in various branches, Blench believes that all of the families postulated as Nilo-Saharan belong together. He proposes the following tentative internal classification, with Songhai closest to Saharan, a relationship that had not previously been suggested:
By 2015,[20] and again in 2017,[21] Blench had refined the subclassification of this model, linking Maban with Fur, Kadu with Eastern Sudanic, and Kuliak with the node that contained them, and added a tentative, extinct branch he names "Plateau" as to explain a possible Nilo-Saharan substrate in the MalianDogon andBangime languages, for the following structure:
Starostin's "Macro-Sudanic" in purple, surrounding language families shown as well
Georgiy Starostin (2016),[22] usinglexicostatistics based on Swadesh lists, is more inclusive thanGlottolog, and in addition finds probable and possible links between the families that will require reconstruction of the proto-languages for confirmation. Starostin also does not consider Greenberg's Nilo-Saharan to be a valid, coherent clade.
In addition to the families listed inGlottolog (previous section), Starostin considers the following to be established:
A relationship ofNyima with Nubian, Nara, and Tama (NNT) is considered "highly likely" and close enough that proper comparative work should be able to demonstrate the connection if it's valid, though it would fall outside NNT proper (seeEastern Sudanic languages).
Other units that are "highly likely" to eventually prove to be valid families are:
In summary, at this level of certainty, "Nilo-Saharan" constitutes ten distinct and separate language families: Eastern Sudanic, Central Sudanic – Kadu, Maba–Kunama, Komuz, Saharan, Songhai, Kuliak, Fur, Berta, and Shabo.
Possible further "deep" connections, which cannot be evaluated until the proper comparative work on the constituent branches has been completed, are:
Eastern Sudanic + Fur + Berta
Central Sudanic – Kadu + Maba–Kunama
There are faint suggestions that Eastern and Central Sudanic may be related (essentially the old Chari–Nile clade), though that possibility is "unexplorable under current conditions" and could be complicated if Niger–Congo were added to the comparison. Starostin finds no evidence that the Komuz, Kuliak, Saharan, Songhai, or Shabo languages are related to any of the other Nilo-Saharan languages.Mimi-D andMeroitic were not considered, though Starostin had previously proposed that Mimi-D was also an isolate despite its slight similarity to Central Sudanic.
In a follow-up study published in 2017, Starostin reiterated his previous points as well as explicitly accepting a genetic relationship between Macro-East Sudanic and Macro-Central Sudanic. Starostin names this proposal "Macro-Sudanic". The classification is as follows.[23]
Starostin (2017) finds significant lexical similarities between Kadu and Central Sudanic, while some lexical similarities also shared by Central Sudanic with Fur-Amdang, Berta, and Eastern Sudanic to a lesser extent.
Dimmendaal et al. consider the evidence for the inclusion ofKadu andSonghay too weak to draw any conclusions at present, whereas there is some evidence thatKoman andGumuz belong together and may be Nilo-Saharan.[26]
The large Northeastern division is based on several typological markers:
By 2023,[27] Blench had slightly revised the model for a deep primary split between Koman–Gumuz and the rest. Kunama and Berta are "provisionally" placed as the next to branch off, because they only partially share the features that unite the rest of the family. However, it is not clear if this is because they actually diverged early, or if they might have lost those features at a later date. For example, Berta shares plausible lexical cognates with theEastern Jebel languages (East Sudanic) and its system of grammatical number "closely resembles" those of theEast Sudanic languages; Kunama could be divergent "due to long-term interaction withAfroasiatic languages." Saharan–Songhay (especially Songhay) have seen substantial erosion of key characteristics, but this appears to be a secondary development and not evidence of early branching. "Core" Nilo-Saharan ("Central African" in Blench 2015) thus appears to be a typological rather than genetic grouping, though Maban is treated as a divergent branch of Eastern Sudanic; Kadu also seems to be quite close. The resulting structure is as follows:
Beyond the work of Colleen Ahland, Blench notes that the inclusion of Koman is buttressed by the work of Manuel Otero.[28] The argument for Songhay is mostly lexical, especially the pronouns. Blench gives Greenberg credit for both East and Central Sudanic. Saharan and Songhay have some "striking" similarities in their lexicon, which Blench argues is genetic, though the absence of reliable proto-Sarahan and proto-Songhay reconstructions makes evaluation difficult.
In summarizing the literature to date, Hammarström et al. inGlottolog do not accept that the following families are demonstrably related with current research:
Proposals for the external relationships of Nilo-Saharan typically center onNiger–Congo: Gregersen (1972) grouped the two together asKongo–Saharan. However, Blench (2011) proposed that the similarities between Niger–Congo and Nilo-Saharan (specifically Atlantic–Congo and Central Sudanic) are due to contact, with the noun-class system of Niger–Congo developed from, or elaborated on the model of, the noun classifiers of Central Sudanic.
Nilo-Saharan languages present great differences, being a highly diversified group. It has proven difficult to reconstruct many aspects of Proto-Nilo-Saharan. Two very different reconstructions of the proto-language have been proposed byLionel Bender andChristopher Ehret.
The phonemes/*d₂,*t₂/ correspond to coronal plosives, the phonetic details are difficult to specify, but clearly, they remain distinct from/*d,*t/ and supported by many phonetic correspondences (another author, Cristopher Ehret, reconstructs for the coronal area the sound[d̪],[ḍ] and[t̪],[ṭ] which perhaps are closer to the phonetic detail of/*d₂,*t₂/, see infra)
Bender gave a list of about 350cognates and discussed in depth the grouping and the phonological system proposed by Ehret. Blench (2000) compares both systems (Bender's and Ehret's) and prefers the former because it is more secure and is based in more reliable data.[29] For example, Bender points out that there is a set of phonemes includingimplosives/*ɓ,*ɗ,*ʄ,*ɠ/,ejectives/*pʼ,*tʼ,(*sʼ),*cʼ,*kʼ/ and prenasal constants/*ᵐb,*ⁿd,(*ⁿt),*ⁿɟ,*ᵑg/, but it seems that they can be reconstructed only for core groups (E, I, J, L) and the collateral group (C, D, F, G, H), but not for Proto-Nilo-Saharan.
Ehret's maximalist system has been criticized byBender andBlench. These authors state that the correspondences used by Ehret are not very clear and because of this many of the sounds in the table may only be allophonic variations.[30]
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^Gerrit Dimmendaal, Colleen Ahland, Angelika Jakobi & Constance Kutsch-Lojenga (2019) "Linguistic features and typologies in languages commonly referred to as 'Nilo-Saharan'", in Wolff, Ekkehard (ed.)Cambridge Handbook of African Linguistics, p.326-381.
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^Schadeberg, Thilo. 1994. Comparative Kadu Wordlists.Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere 40:11–48. University of Cologne.
^abcdeRilly, Claude. 2010. Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique. Leuven: Peeters Publishers.
^abYigezu, Moges. 2001.A comparative study of the phonetics and phonology of Surmic languages. Bruxelles: Université libre de Bruxelles. Doctoral dissertation, University of Bruxelles.
^Heine, Bernd. 1976. TheKuliak Languages of Eastern Uganda. Nairobi: East African Publishing House.
^Jordan, Linda, Hussein Mohammed, and Jillian Netzley. 2015. Sociolinguistic Survey of the Shabo of Ethiopia. SIL Electronic Survey Report 2015-019. SIL International.
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^Gaudefroy-Demombynes, Maurice. 1907. Document sur les Langues de l'Oubangui-Chari. InActes du XVIe Congrès International des Orientalistes, Alger, 1905, Part II, 172–330. Paris: Ernest Leroux.
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