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Nilo-Saharan languages, a group of languages that form one of the four language stocks or families on the African continent, the others being Afro-Asiatic, Khoisan, and Niger-Congo. The Nilo-Saharan languages are presumed to be descended from a common ancestral language and, therefore, to be genetically related.
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.
- None
- ca. 70 million for all branches listed below.
- Proposed language family
It lists the range of languages and language groups within the region such as Kunama, Eastern Sudanic, Nara, Berta, Nilotic, and Surmic. The geographical spread probably reflects the chronological and historical diffusion of the ancestral languages from the west.
In terms of numbers of speakers, the most significant divisions of Nilo-Saharan languages include Central Sudanic, Fur, Nilotic, Nubian, Saharan, Songhai, and Surmic. Songhai is spoken by more than 2 million people in Mali and Niger, and Kanuri (a Saharan language) is spoken by about 4.5 million in northeastern Nigeria and adjacent Chad and Niger.
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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.
The historic distributions of major language groups who presumably occupied what is now the Savanna-Sahel-to-Sahara belt at this time are two, the “Niger-Congo” and the “Nilo-Saharan” language families, whose continental distributions are westward (at left, all of the colored areas except for extreme southwestern Africa)and eastward (at right, e...