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 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 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 (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 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 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
Tone
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 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.
Nubian languages
Nubian languages, group of languages spoken in Sudan and southern Egypt, chiefly along the banks of the Nile River (where Nobiin and Kenzi [Kenuzi] are spoken) but also in enclaves in the Nuba Hills of southern Sudan (Hill Nubian) and in Darfur (where Birked [Birgid] and Midob [Midobi] are spoken). These languages are now considered to be a part of the Nilo-Saharan language family. Nilo-Saharan languages
The name Nuba (or one of its variants) is already attested for Old Egyptian, the language of the Pharaonic period in Egyptian history, where a root nb occurred. Nubai was mentioned as an ethnonym by the Greek geographer and astronomer Eratosthenes of Cyrene in the 3rd century BCE to denote the inhabitants of the Nile valley south of Aswān in what are today southern Egypt and northern Sudan. This region, as mentioned above, continues to support peoples who speak so-called Nile Nubian. Nilo-Saharan languages
Documents in Old Nubian, which appears to be the ancestor of modern Central Nubian, date from the end of the 8th century to the beginning of the 14th century. These are usually translations of Christian writings originally in Greek and are written, as is modern Nubian, in an adaptation of the Coptic alphabet.
Among the earliest records of any African language is an Italian-Nubian word list collected in Egypt about 1635 by Arcangelo Carradori, a Franciscan monk, and based on the Nile Nubian Kenzi and Nobiin dialects. With Midob and Birked, the Nile Nubian languages probably represent ancient instances of linguistic dispersion.
The intrusion of Hill Nubian into the Nuba Hills, however, is more recent. During the Arab destruction of the Nubian kingdoms between the 13th and 16th centuries, some of the Nubian groups dispersed to the hill country of Kordofan, central-southern Sudan, taking with them their speech and their name. By extension, the name Nubii (or variants of this name) came to be used to designate other peoples of this region. The variant name Nuba is therefore primarily a geographic term referring to the inhabitants of what are now known as the Nuba Hills. Historically, however, the name is inaccurate in view of the diversity of languages and cultures that the inhabitants of these hills present; these groups are in no way homogeneous. Nilo-Saharan languages
Eastern Sudanic languages
Eastern Sudanic languages, a group of languages representing the most diverse of the major divisions within the Nilo-Saharan language family. These languages are spoken from southern Egypt in the north to Tanzania in the south and from Ethiopia and Eritrea in the east to Chad in the west. During the first half of the 20th century, the term Eastern Sudanic was also used to refer to the eastern members of a larger grouping of languages then called Sudanic.
Nilotic and Nubian are the two most important groups of the Eastern Sudanic languages. The remaining groups are Surmic, Eastern Jebel, Taman, Daju, Nera, Kuliak, Nyimang and Afitti (or Dinik), and Temein and Keiga Jirru. Nilo-Saharan languages
Of these, the Nyimang and Afitti (or Dinik) and the group that includes Temein and Keiga Jirru languages are spoken (together with the Nubian languages) in the Nuba Hills. The Kuliak languages, spoken by only a few small communities in Uganda known as Ik (Teuso), Soo, and Tepes, are surrounded by speakers of Nilotic languages. Farther northeast, in the border area of Sudan, South Sudan, and Ethiopia, other Nilo-Saharan languages are found. In this linguistically complex area, several Nilo-Saharan groups—Surmic (or Surma, also known as Didinga-Murle, after two of its members), Eastern Jebel, and Berta, in the angle formed by the Blue Nile in Ethiopia and the Sudan border—are interspersed with Afro-Asiatic groups (mainly groups speaking languages belonging to the Cushitic and Omotic branches of that family). The territory of the Nera (also known as Barea, a name they consider to be pejorative), who were first mentioned in a 4th-century inscription by King Ezana of Aksum, adjoins that of the Eritrean speakers of Kunama and Ilit languages.
