Nilo-Saharan languagesa 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 family covers major areas east and north of Lake Victoria in East Africa and extends westward as far as the Niger valley in Mali, West Africa. Its genetic unity was first proposed in a classificatory study dating from 1963 by the American linguist and anthropologist Joseph 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 the commencement of comparative studies in which the historical relationships between these languages became a central issue. The German Egyptologist Karl 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 the Arabic 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 Africanist Diedrich 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 showed affinities with languages in southern Africa (the latter had come to be known as Bantu 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, and Eastern 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 the Chari and Nile rivers or in the areas between them, the name Macro-Sudanic was subsequently changed to Chari-Nile. This new name helped to distinguish Greenberg’s grouping from the Sudanic of some of Greenberg’s intellectual predecessors. Greenberg’s Chari-Nile family included, among others, a Central Sudanic and an Eastern Sudanic branch. The latter were coterminous 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 as Margaret A. Bryan, Carlo Conti Rossini, Sir Harry Johnston, Johannes Lukas, G.W. Murray, Roland C. Stevenson, and Archibald 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 and comprehensive 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-Nile designation is now considered obsolete. In addition to Kunama, Berta, and the Eastern Sudanic and Central Sudanic languages (once in the Chari-Nile group), most scholars now consider Nilo-Saharan to include Songhai, Saharan, Maban, Komuz, and Fur.

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 as Kadu (or Kadugli-Krongo, formerly Tumtum) spoken in the Nuba Hills of The Sudan. 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. (See Table:

Designations and classification 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 the integrity of larger units proposed by Greenberg, such as Eastern Sudanic, has been questioned. Overall historical-comparative work in the strict sense, using Neogrammarian notions of regular sound correspondences between cognate forms in related languages and notions of shared innovations 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 as Nilotic, Nubian, and Saharan. These studies have revealed such additional information as a closer historical affinity between certain branches—for example, between the Nilotic and Surmic and the Nubian and Taman groups.

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

The diffusion of Nilo-Saharan languages

The original expansion of the Nilo-Saharan family may have been associated with the Aquatic industry. This industry, which dates to the 8th millennium BC BCE, is a conglomeration of cultures that exploited the food resources of lakes, rivers, and surrounding areas from Lake Rudolf in East Africa to the bend of the Niger River in West Africa during a long era of wetter climate and higher lake levels than prevail today. The subsequent deterioration of the Saharan environment in the 6th millennium BC BCE may be the reason for the relative geographic and linguistic isolation of several groups, especially in the western and central zones—e.g., the geographic locations where the Songhai, Saharan, Fur, Maban, Taman, or Daju languages were situated at the end of the 20th century.

In recent times several Nilo-Saharan languages in these areas, such as Fur, Kanuri, and Songhai, became associated with centralized political units whose states formed important chains in trans-Saharan trade routes. The Songhai language, now spoken by more than a million people living along the Niger River in West Africa from Mali to Nigeria, developed into the lingua franca of the Songhai empire, which reached its peak in the 15th century. The Songhai speech community probably absorbed speakers from various other linguistic communities through a process of primary language shift. Other modern Nilo-Saharan languages with more than a million speakers are the Saharan language Kanuri (mainly in Nigeria), Nile Nubian, and the Nilotic languages Dinka (The South Sudan), Kalenjin (Kenya), Luo (mainly in Kenya and Tanzania), and Teso (Uganda and Kenya). Of these, only Kanuri is a lingua franca in the proper sense.

Such processes of linguistic expansion, while presumably common in human history, sometimes result in the extinction of other languages as the domains of language use begin to overlap to the extent that one of them becomes obsolete. Although the situation was somewhat less dramatic than in some other parts of the world, a number of Nilo-Saharan languages were endangered at the beginning of the 21st century because their speakers shifted toward other primary languages for daily communication. Such shifts can be observed for a number of Nilo-Saharan languages spoken by ethnic groups that generally number fewer than 1,000 speakers—e.g., the Kuliak language Nyang’i (Uganda), the Surmic language Kwegu (Ethiopia), and the Nilotic language Okiek (Kenya). Gule (or Anej), a Komuz language of The Sudan, is now extinct, and the people speak Arabic.

The Maban languages, including Masalit, in Chad also are under pressure from Arabic, an important lingua franca and a prestigious language of education in the area. These gradual shifts in language domains sometimes are accelerated by other factors. The construction of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt in the 1960s, for example, forced many speakers of the Nile Nubian variety of Kenuz and Fadicca to abandon their ancestral land along the Nile, between Aswān and the Sudanese border, and to relocate to “New Nubia,” north of Aswān. An increase in daily contact with speakers of Arabic and the higher prestige of this official language of Egypt have resulted in a decrease in Nubian language use and competence. Massive resettlement schemes in the 1980s and ’90s for Sudanese refugees in such neighbouring countries as Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and Congo (Kinshasa) the Democratic Republic of the Congo have led to new multilingual settings. Moreover, modern urbanization may turn out to have a catalytic effect on the diffusion of particular languages at the expense of others. The majority of the more than 100 Nilo-Saharan languages nevertheless thrive as oral, and sometimes as written, means of communication.

Linguistic characteristics

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—such as voiceless ejective versus voiced implosive consonants—are found, for example, in Koma, a Komuz language of western Ethiopia; comparable consonant distinctions occur in such Omotic (Afro-Asiatic) languages as Maale (southwestern Ethiopia). Several Central Sudanic languages, most of which are situated along the southern fringe of the Nilo-Saharan zone, share the presence of complex consonant systems with neighbouring Adamawa-Ubangi (Niger-Congo) languages. On the other hand, southern representatives of Nilotic have relatively simple consonant systems, as are common in neighbouring Bantu languages (which belong to the Niger-Congo language family). Such areal diffusion of properties usually results from extensive historical contacts and mutual borrowing not only of lexical items but also of structural features in situations of long-term bilingualism.

Areal features

Most Nilo-Saharan languages are tonal; i.e., they use relative pitch on a syllable or word to mark lexical or grammatical distinctions. A number of them—western varieties of Songhai or northern varieties of Nubian—border on nontonal languages and are themselves only marginally tonal. On the other hand, languages in central Africa, such as the western dialect of Lugbara (a Central Sudanic language spoken in the border area of Congo [Kinshasa] the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda and bordering on highly tonal Niger-Congo languages), sometimes distinguish between as many as four tonal levels.

Vowel harmony

An additional areal feature, prominent especially in the Central Sudanic and in the Nilotic and Surmic groups of Eastern Sudanic and shared by neighbouring Niger-Congo languages, is that of vowel harmony. This feature restricts the co-occurrence in any given word of vowels that belong to more than one of two harmonic sets. Each of these harmonic sets includes five vowels, one set being produced with an advanced tongue root and the other with a retracted tongue root. In such Western Nilotic languages as Dinka, this contrast has developed further into a contrast between breathy voice and creaky (or hard) voice. Dinka has developed another universally rare feature, namely a three-way length distinction for vowels.

Word order

As observed by Greenberg in his language typology work, the position of the verb relative to the subject or object is known to correspond, in statistically significant ways, with other syntactic properties. Languages placing the verb before the subject and the object, for example, tend to have prepositions and auxiliaries preceding the main verb, whereas languages placing the verb after the subject and object tend to have postpositions and auxiliaries following the verb. Both of these typological extremes are represented in the Nilo-Saharan family. Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in the more eastern zones, such as many Nilotic and several Surmic languages as well as those belonging to the Kuliak and Kadu groups, belong to the former type, whereas western and northern Nilo-Saharan languages such as Fur, Kunama, and the Maban and Nubian languages have verb-final structures. Alternatively, word order is relatively free in some Surmic languages. It alternates between a verb–object order and auxiliary–object–verb order in Central Sudanic. Syntactic relations between constituents tend to be expressed by way of case-marking suffixes (or sometimes tonal inflection)—for example, for nominative, absolutive, accusative, genitive, dative, locative, associative, and instrumental case, although none of these necessarily co-occur in all languages at the same time.


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 The South Sudan, demonstrates one widespread morphological property whereby either the singular or the plural form of a noun is expressed by the basic, morphologically simplex, form, as in rima’ ‘blood,’ rima-tat ‘a drop of blood’; nyɔmɔt ‘seeds,’ nyɔmɔt-ti; ‘seed’; Bari ‘Bari people (plural),’ Bari-nit ‘Bari person (singular).’ In addition, collective forms occur (e.g., nyɔmɔt-an ‘many kinds of seeds’), as do replacement patterns, a technique whereby both the singular and the plural are marked by way of number-marking suffixes (grammatical elements following the core or root of a word, as in the above examples). Such number-marking systems occur in a wide variety of Nilo-Saharan languages, usually in a plethora of forms. As several of the attested number-marking suffixes are similar or identical in form across languages, they most likely go back to a common ancestor.


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 between perfective/imperfective aspect verb stems in such distantly related groups as Saharan, Taman, Nyimang, and the Surmic languages. The verbal markers for causative, dative, and negation also tend to be similar in form. Furthermore, specific verbal inflectional features, such as the widespread forms for the first person singular (usually a verbal prefix a-) and second person singular (usually a verbal prefix i-), are best explained as retentions from a common ancestral language.


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 Nilotic languages it has developed into a fully inflectional property of nouns—i.e., all nouns are either inherently masculine or feminine; in a few Eastern Nilotic languages nouns may also have neuter gender as an inherent property. Early investigators of these easternmost representatives of Nilo-Saharan had claimed that these languages contained strong fundamental features from the “northern zone,” also known as Hamitic (and subsequently renamed Cushitic, now part of Afro-Asiatic). The extent and meaning of this so-called “Hamitic component” in Masai and other Nilotic languages was to become a major taxonomic issue at the beginning of the 20th century. The concept of language mixture (as an alternative to a uniform genetic classification into distinct language families) was defended most vigorously by the Africanist Carl Meinhof, who referred to these languages as “Nilo-Hamitic.” But, as Greenberg pointed out in his classificatory work, the mere presence of gender points only toward typological similarities between languages. What is at the heart of a genetic relationship (and a presumed common historical origin from the same ancestral language) is a resemblance between languages in sound and meaning for basic vocabulary items as well as in the form and function of grammatical markers.


For most Nilo-Saharan languages, there is no ancient literary tradition. A notable exception is Old Nubian, which was probably in use among Christian communities between the 8th and the 11th centuries. This writing system, attested in manuscripts and inscriptions, was derived from that of Coptic, which was adapted mainly from the Greek alphabet, and to a lesser extent from the Meroitic script. Old Nubian was abandoned after Islam spread to this area of northern Sudan. Nubian languages occasionally have been written in Arabic script.

Although several Nilo-Saharan languages are used primarily as a means of oral communication, there is a widespread tendency among governments of modern African states to integrate these into the educational system, next to official (European) languages such as English (in Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda) and French (in Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, and Congo [Kinshasa]the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Such a policy may be combined with the use of a national language (Amharic in Ethiopia or Swahili in Kenya). Nilotic languages such as Luo, Masai, and Turkana are taught in primary schools in Kenya together with English and Swahili. The official policy of The Sudan with respect to the use of vernacular languages along with Arabic and English has fluctuated during the decades after its independence in 1956. In Ethiopia, Amharic remained the sole medium for public communication and education until the reign of the emperor Haile Selassie was terminated in 1974. Thereafter several other languages (e.g., the Nilotic language Anywa) were introduced into the official educational system. Similarly, in Eritrea, which became an independent state in 1993, the use of Nilo-Saharan languages such as Kunama and Nera has been encouraged in educational policy at the primary level. Eritrea thereby followed the modern African trend of combining the use of official or national languages with that of regional and local languages.

An adapted form of the Fidal script, which was used for writing Amharic, has been developed for the orthographies of a number of Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in Ethiopia. Other orthographic traditions of writing for African languages generally are based on the Latin script, because it was mostly European missionaries who were instrumental in developing such orthographies, especially from the 19th century onward. In some of these languages there is a flourishing written literature today—in particular for Nilotic languages such as Luo or Acholi. The Ugandan writer Okot p’Bitek was among the first African writers to publish in his mother tongue (Acholi) rather than in English, French, or Portuguese.