Nilo-Saharan languages, a group of languages that form one of the fourlanguage stocks or families on the African continent, the others beingAfro-Asiatic,Khoisan, andNiger-Congo. The Nilo-Saharan languages arepresumed to be descended from a common ancestral language and, therefore, to be genetically related. The family covers major areas east and north ofLake Victoria inEast Africa and extends westward as far as theNiger valley inMali,West Africa. Its genetic unity was first proposed in a classificatory study dating from 1963 by the American linguist and anthropologistJoseph H. Greenberg.

History of classification

Whereas the first grammars of African languages probably date to the 17th century, it was especially during the 19th century that European missionaries and explorers set out to study the vast number of languages on the continent. The same era saw thecommencement of comparative studies in which the historical relationships between these languages became a central issue. The German EgyptologistKarl Richard Lepsius, for example, arrived at a three-way classification of the languages on the continent: a northern zone, a middle zone, and a southern zone. But, whereas in the case of the West African members of the so-called middle zone (also referred to as “Sudanic,” after theArabic expression for “the lands of the blacks”) clear-cut evidence for genetic relationship was gradually forthcoming during the next decades, several central as well as the eastern representatives did not fit in easily with the rest. As the eminent German AfricanistDiedrich Westermann observed in a number of studies he published in the 1920s and ’30s, languages of this Sudanic belt were of two kinds: those languages of western and south-central Africa that showedaffinities with languages in southern Africa (the latter had come to be known asBantu languages) and those in the north-central and eastern parts of the continent that did not. This led Westermann to postulate three groups of so-called Sudanic languages: Western Sudanic,Central Sudanic, andEastern Sudanic.

In a groundbreaking comparative study of African languages that was published in a series of articles between 1949 and 1954 and reprinted in book form in 1955, Greenberg postulated the existence of a new family he termed Macro-Sudanic. Because many of the languages included in this family were located in the watersheds of theChari andNile rivers or in the areas between them, the name Macro-Sudanic was subsequently changed toChari-Nile. This new name helped to distinguish Greenberg’s grouping from the Sudanic of some of Greenberg’sintellectual predecessors. Greenberg’s Chari-Nile family included, among others, a Central Sudanic and an Eastern Sudanic branch. The latter werecoterminous with, but not entirely identical to, Westermann’s Central Sudanic and Eastern Sudanic groups, since specific languages and language groups had been added or excluded from these groups by Greenberg. In his classificatory work, Greenberg further followed the lead of scholars such asMargaret A. Bryan, Carlo Conti Rossini, Sir Harry Johnston, Johannes Lukas,G.W. Murray, Roland C. Stevenson, andArchibald N. Tucker, whose pioneering descriptive and comparative work had resulted in more detailed knowledge of the language map of eastern and central Africa.

In a follow-up study published in 1963, purporting to be a new andcomprehensive genetic classification of African languages, Greenberg postulated the Nilo-Saharan family. This superstock was essentially the earlier Chari-Nile family together with certain languages or groups formerly assigned to independent and historically isolated units. The Chari-Niledesignation is now considered obsolete. In addition toKunama,Berta, and the Eastern Sudanic and Central Sudanic languages (once in the Chari-Nile group), most scholars now consider Nilo-Saharan to includeSonghai,Saharan,Maban,Komuz, andFur.

A further reclassification in terms of genetic affiliation, also made possible as a result of improved knowledge, occurred with respect to a group of languages known asKadu (or Kadugli-Krongo, formerly Tumtum) spoken in the Nuba Hills ofSudan. Its Nilo-Saharan affiliation is now widely accepted. In Greenberg’s 1963 comparative study of African languages, however, the Kadu languages had been classified as Kordofanian—a branch of Niger-Congo—although it had already been pointed out that this group showed considerable divergence from the rest.

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Languages & Alphabets

Designations and classifications of the Nilo-Saharan languages are provided in the table.

The postulated genetic unity of Nilo-Saharan is now widely accepted, but its internal classification, and especially theintegrity of larger units proposed by Greenberg, such as Eastern Sudanic, has been questioned. Overall historical-comparative work in the strict sense, usingNeogrammarian notions of regular sound correspondences between cognate forms in related languages and notions of sharedinnovations in order to arrive at proper subclassifications (as developed in the comparative study of Indo-European languages), is still lacking for the family as a whole. Considerable progress has been made, however, in the comparative study of several well-established lower-level units such asNilotic,Nubian, and Saharan. These studies have revealed such additional information as a closer historicalaffinity between certain branches—for example, between the Nilotic andSurmic and the Nubian and Taman groups.

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A number of scholars have suggested that Nilo-Saharan forms a larger genetic unit with Niger-Congo. Some scholars also have argued that theMeroitic language—which survives only in inscriptions, as it became extinct after theMeroe kingdom (or kingdom of Cush [Kush]) fell to the expanding Ethiopian empire ofAksum in the 4th centuryce—belongs to the Nilo-Saharan family.