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The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by somewhere around 70 million speakers, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet.
- Overview
- Linguistic characteristics
- Morphology
- Verbs
- Gender
The considerable typological diversity that characterizes the Nilo-Saharan languages corresponds to their wide geographic spread. Structural properties—for example, with respect to sound systems and word order—often are shared with unrelated neighbouring language groups. Thus, rich and complex consonant systems with universally rare distinctions—su...
The considerable typological diversity that characterizes the Nilo-Saharan languages corresponds to their wide geographic spread. Structural properties—for example, with respect to sound systems and word order—often are shared with unrelated neighbouring language groups. Thus, rich and complex consonant systems with universally rare distinctions—su...
Apart from widespread lexical roots whose form and meaning relationships are similar, there are grammatical properties that clearly point toward a common historical origin for the Nilo-Saharan languages. Bari, a Nilotic language of South Sudan, demonstrates one widespread morphological property whereby either the singular or the plural form of a no...
The verb tends to constitute the most complex aspect of Nilo-Saharan languages. It frequently involves extensive marking for conjugational features such as person, number, tense (the expression of time), aspect, or voice, with consonant mutation often accompanying such morphological processes. A widespread and rather permanent distinction is that b...
Gender distinctions between masculine and feminine (or neuter) nouns are common in the neighbouring Afro-Asiatic family (as they are in Indo-European languages) but not in Nilo-Saharan, which has only a few exceptions. Gender as a derivational property of nouns is found, for example, in Southern and Western Nilotic languages, whereas in the Eastern...
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The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by somewhere around 70 million speakers, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet.
This chapter introduces the expanse of the Nilo-Saharan region, the language family that spread across Central and Eastern Africa. It lists the range of languages and language groups within the region such as Kunama, Eastern Sudanic, Nara, Berta, Nilotic, and Surmic.
Among the world’s languages, Arabic ranks fourth in the number of speakers. Other important Semitic languages are Hebrew, which shares official status in Israel with Arabic, and several Ethiopic languages. Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia and the first language of 21 million, is a South Ethiopic language.
The Nilo-Saharan languages are a family of African languages. They are spoken by around 50 million people, who mainly live in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers. The languages go through 17 countries in the northern half of Africa: from Algeria to Benin in the west; from Libya to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the center
Saharan languages, group of languages that constitutes one of the major divisions of Nilo-Saharan languages. Saharan languages are spoken mainly around Lake Chad—which is located at the conjunction of Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Niger—but also in Libya and Sudan.
