IV.

The Nilo-Saharan Family

The around 200 Nilo-Saharan languages are found in a broken chain from the great bend of the Niger River in West Africa to Ethiopia, throughout most of the upper Nile valley, and in parts of Uganda and Kenya. The westernmost branch of this family is Songhai, an important language group with no close relatives, spoken along much of the upper Niger River in Mali and Niger. The Saharan branch of this family includes languages spoken in north-eastern Nigeria, through the Republic of Chad to the east, and into the oasis settlements of Libya to the north.

Along the River Nile near the southern border of Egypt and in scattered areas to the south-west are the Nubian languages, Chari-Nile languages spoken by about 1 million people. The Nubian alphabet was derived from that of the Coptic language. Nubian religious documents dating from the 8th to the 14th century form the only literature of a living African language that was written before the modern period (see Nubia). In southern Sudan and in northern Uganda and Kenya a group of languages known as Nilotic belongs to this branch; important representatives are Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, and Acholi (or Luo). Languages spoken farther to the south-east, including Maasai in Kenya, have long been called Nilo-Hamitic; recent investigations, however, appear to prove that these tongues have no direct relationship to languages of the Afro-Asiatic family, but are most closely related to the Nilotic languages.

In many Nilo-Saharan languages, a system of noun suffixes indicates grammatical relationships; this system somewhat resembles the case system of Latin, but is quite unlike that of any other family of languages in Africa.