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The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of around 210 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...
The Nilo-Saharan family consists of approximately 160 languages and is one of four linguistic families in Africa. The family is subdivided into ten branches and further into other subgroups, languages, and dialects.
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.
The diffusion of Nilo-Saharan languages. The original expansion of the Nilo-Saharan family may have been associated with the Aquatic industry.
The main article for this category is Nilo-Saharan languages. Wikimedia Commons has media related to Nilo-Saharan languages. language portal.
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Which African languages belong to Nilo-Saharan?
The two most populous languages (each spoken by 3.5 million people ) are Luo of Kenya, and Kanuri of Nigeria. A number of Nilo-Saharan languages became endangered in the 20th century because their speakers adopted other, more prestigious and more widely used languages such as Arabic and Swahili.
