Nilo-saharan (Noun)
Meaning
A family of East African languages spoken by Nilotic peoples from the Sahara south to Kenya and Tanzania.
Classification
Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents.
Examples
- The Nilotic languages, which belong to the Nilo-Saharan language family, are spoken by approximately eight million people in southern Sudan, southwestern Ethiopia, and northwestern Kenya.
- Scholars believe that the Nilo-Saharan language family, including languages spoken by the Maasai people, diverged around 8,000 years ago.
- A comprehensive linguistic analysis has shown that the Luo and Maasai languages belong to the Nilo-Saharan language family, a family of East African languages.
- Some linguists propose that the Nilo-Saharan language family also includes languages spoken in northern Democratic Republic of Congo, southern Chad, and parts of Cameroon.
- Recent research has led some scholars to argue that the Nilo-Saharan language family, comprising around 200 languages, may not be a language family in the classical sense, but rather a grouping of several distinct language families.