The Nilo-Saharan languages are a hypothetical group of African languages spoken mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers (hence the term "Nilo-"), including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of Nile meet. Its member languages extend, however, through 17 nations in the northern half of Africa: from Algeria and Mali in the northwest; to Benin, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the south; and Sudan to Tanzania in the east (excluding the Horn of Africa). The largest part of its major subfamilies are found in the modern nation of Sudan, through which the Nile River flows in all its incarnations: the White and Blue Nile, which join to form the main Nile at Khartoum. As seen in the hyphenated name (compare map at right), Nilo-Saharan is primarily a family of the African interior, including the greater Nile basin and its tributaries as well as the central Sahara desert.
Characteristics
Roughly 11 million people spoke Nilo-Saharan languages as of 1987, according to
Merritt Ruhlen's estimate.
A characteristic feature of the family is a tripartite singulative–collective–plurative number system, which is found in every branch but Gumuz. Internally, Nilo-Saharan is extremely diverse—far more so than Indo-European or Niger-Congo—and rather controversial; if the various branches are related, there must have been typological restructuring in nearly every one.
Major Languages
Within the larger Nilo-Saharan language family are a number of major African languages with at least half a million speakers (SIL Ethnologue, 2005 figures):
- Luo (3,465,000 speakers), extending from Kenya and eastern Uganda into Tanzania, and the language of the Luo, Kenya's third largest major ethnic group (after the Niger-Congo Kikuyu and Luhya). US politician Barack Obama's father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., born in Kenya's far western Nyanza Province, was a speaker of the language. (The term "Luo", somewhat confusingly, is also used for the larger classification within the Western Nilotic subfamily that includes Kenyan Luo/Dholuo among its 15 members.) I
- Kanuri (3,340,000, all dialects), with speakers found from Niger to northeastern Nigeria, where it is a major national ethnic group.
- Songhay (2.9 million, all dialects), with its speakers widely spread along the Niger River in Mali and Burkina Faso. The largest variety is Zarma, a major language of Niger, while Songhay is also spoken throughout the historic Songhai Empire, including its former capital Gao and the well-known city of Timbuktu. Its inclusion in the Nilo-Saharan family is controversial, however.
- Dinka (2,000,000 +), found within Southern Sudan, the language of one of the most powerful Southern Sudanese ethnic groups, including that of John Garang, late commander of the Sudanese Liberation Army.
- Lango (977,680), spoken by one of Uganda's major ethnicities, found in Lango region in the center of the country. Along with the Acholi people (below), the Lango people were targets of severe ethnic persecution under dictator Idi Amin, a member of a fellow Nilo-Saharan ethnicity, the Kakwa.
- Masai (883,000), spoken by the Masai people of Kenya and Tanzania, one of the most well-known African ethnic groups internationally.
- Nuer (804,907), the language of the Nuer tribe, another powerful Southern Sudanese ethnicity.
- Acholi (791,796), the other member of the Luo-Acholi subfamily within Western Nilotic, spoken in Acholiland in Uganda and in Opari District of Sudan. It is closely related to Lango.
- Fur (501,800), notable as one of the major languages of Darfur (lit. "the home of the Fur" in Arabic), the Sudanese province currently in the news for its humanitarian crisis.
- Nubian (495,000, all dialects), the language of Ancient Egypt's traditional nemesis Nubia, extending today from southern Egypt into northern Sudan.
Internal relationships
Nilo-Saharan is a still rather tentative proposal, and the reconstructions needed to verify it have not been done. Few historical linguists have attempted work on the family as a whole, and several have denied its validity. Even linguists which accept it may not accept it in its entirety.
Roger Blench, for example, notes morphological similarities in all branches but
Gumuz, which leads him to believe that the family is otherwise valid but that Gumuz is a
language isolate.
The language most commonly singled out for exclusion is Songhay, the language of Timbuktu and its empire, though most linguists who accept Nilo-Saharan accept Songhay as well, and posit that it is divergent due to massive influence from the Mande languages. Christopher Ehret attempts to show Songhay is particularly closely related to the Maban branch of Nilo-Saharan.
Also problematic are the Kuliak languages, which are spoken by hunter-gatherers and appear to retain a non-Nilo-Saharan core; Blench believes they may have been similar to the Hadza or Dahalo and shifted incompletely to Nilo-Saharan.
Many linguists consider the Kadu languages (also called Kadugli or Tumtum) to be Nilo-Saharan, while Ehret believes they form a small family of their own. The Ethnologue by SIL, following Anbessa Tefera and Peter Unseth, considers the poorly attested Shabo language to be Nilo-Saharan, but otherwise unclassified due to lack of data. Ehret considered it a language isolate. Proposals have sometimes been made to add Mande (usually classed as Niger-Congo) to Nilo-Saharan, largely due to its many noteworthy similarities with Songhay. However, most linguists believe that Mande is clearly Niger-Congo, and the similarities are due to Mande influence on Songhay, as noted above.
Recently, the extinct Meroitic language of ancient Kush has been demonstrated to be Nilo-Saharan.
Greenberg, modified by Bender 1989
According to
Joseph Greenberg (
The Languages of Africa) as initially modified by
Lionel Bender (and adopted by the
Ethnologue), they are classified into the following branches:
- Komuz
- Koman
- Gumuz
- Saharan
- Songhay
- Fur
- Maban
- Chari-Nile
- Central Sudanic
- Kunama
- Berta
- Eastern Sudanic (including Nubian and Nilotic)
Bender 2000
By 2000 Bender had abandoned the Chari-Nile and Komuz branches, and added Kadu and Kuliak:
- Songhay
- Saharan
- Kuliak
- Satellite-Core
- Maban
- Fur
- Central Sudanic
- Berta
- Kunama
- Core
- Eastern Sudanic
- Koman
- Gumuz
- Kadu
Ehret 2001
In his reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan,
Christopher Ehret classifies them in a radically different fashion, moving Koman to the periphery, Songhay deeper into the family next to Maban, and Berta and Kuliak into East Sudanic:
External relations
Proposals for the external relationships of Nilo-Saharan typically center on
Niger-Congo: Gregersen (1972) grouped the two together to form
Kongo-Saharan, whereas Blench (1995) actually proposed that Niger-Congo may simply be a member of Nilo-Saharan (coordinate with
Central Sudanic.) However, such theories are treated with reserve by most historical linguists.
Bibliography
- Lionel Bender, 2000. "Nilo-Saharan". In Bernd Heine and Derek Nurse, eds., African Languages: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press.
- Christopher Ehret, 2001. A Historical-Comparative Reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan. Köln.
- Joseph Greenberg, 1963. The Languages of Africa (International Journal of American Linguistics 29.1). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
External relationships
- Roger Blench. "Is Niger-Congo simply a branch of Nilo-Saharan?", in ed. Nicolai & Rottland, Fifth Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium. Nice, 24-29 August 1992. Proceedings. (Nilo-Saharan 10). Koeln: Koeppe Verlag. 1995. pp.36-49.
- Edgar Gregersen. "Kongo-Saharan". Journal of African Languages, 11, 1:69-89. 1972.
See also
External links
