Nilo-Saharan Languages, heterogeneous phylum containing close to 200 languages spoken by an estimated 70 million people. The languages are spoken along the upper reaches of the Nile and southern Sahara, from the bend of the Niger river in West Africa, including Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Chad, to East Africa, for example, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda. Nilo-Saharan languages display such considerable diversity, however, that their genetic unity and internal organization remain controversial, and some linguists have suggested that the Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo super-families derive from the same (Congo-Saharan) source. Proposed families within Nilo-Saharan include, among others, Saharan, Songhai, Central Sudanic, and East Sudanic (including the large Nilotic branch). The Saharan family includes (Central) Kanuri, spoken by 3 million speakers in north-east Nigeria (4 million including second-language speakers). Songhai (3 million in Mali and Niger), the westernmost language (and possibly at least 5 different languages, including Songhay and Zarma), is an isolate with no close relatives, and some scholars place it in the Mande group of the Niger-Congo phylum. Major Nilotic languages include all varieties of Dinka (2 million in Sudan), Luo (3 million in Kenya and Tanzania), Maasai (fewer than 1 million in Kenya and Tanzania), and Nuer (fewer than 1 million; Sudan, Ethiopia). The East Sudanic language Nubian (fewer than 1 million; Sudan, southern Egypt), which today has around 11 varieties, historically used an alphabet largely based on Coptic and Greek, and (Old) Nubian scripts survive from the 8th to 14th centuries AD.

Nilo-Saharan languages typically co-index pronominal subjects and objects on the verb, and many (verb-final) languages use case-marking on nouns to express grammatical relations and semantic functions, for example, dative or instrumental. Irregular perfective/imperfective alternations are also common. A common basic word order in Nilo-Saharan is subject-object-verb. See also Grammar; Parts of Speech; Semantics; African Languages.

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.