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Nilotic
Geographic distribution	Southwestern Ethiopia, South Sudan, Sudan, northeastern Congo (DRC), northern/eastern Uganda, western/southern Kenya and northern Tanzania
Ethnicity	Nilotic peoples
Native speakers	50 million
Linguistic classification	Nilo-Saharan? Eastern Sudanic Southern Eastern Nilotic
Proto-language	Proto-Nilotic
Subdivisions	Eastern Southern Western
Language codes
Glottolog	nilo1247
Region where Nilotic languages are spoken

The Nilotic languages are a group of related languages spoken across a wide area between South Sudan and Tanzania by the Nilotic peoples.

Etymology

The word Nilotic means of or relating to the Nile River or to the Nile region of Africa.

Demographics

Nilotic peoples, who are the native speakers of the languages, originally migrated from the Gezira area in Sudan. Nilotic language speakers live in parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda.

Subdivisions

According to linguist Joseph Greenberg, the language family is divided up into three subgroups:

• Eastern Nilotic languages such as Turkana and Maasai
• Southern Nilotic languages such as Kalenjin and Datooga
• Western Nilotic languages such as Luo, Nuer and Dinka

Before Greenberg's reclassification, Nilotic was used to refer to Western Nilotic alone, with the other two being grouped as related "Nilo-Hamitic" languages.

Blench (2012) treats the Burun languages as a fourth subgroup of Nilotic. In previous classifications, the languages were included within the Luo languages. Starostin (2015) treats the Mabaan-Burun languages as "West Nilotic" but outside the Luo level.

Reconstruction

Over 200 Proto-Nilotic lexical roots have been reconstructed by Dimmendaal (1988). Dimmendaal reconstructs the proto Nilotic consonants as follows:

Numerals

Comparison of numerals in individual languages:

See also

• Nilotic peoples
• Paranilotic languages
• Nilo-Saharan languages
• Kir–Abbaian languages
• Proto-Nilotic reconstructions (Wiktionary)

Further reading

• Starostin, George. 2017. On the issue of areal-genetic entanglement in the basic lexicon: the fate of ʽmoonʼ in the Macro-Sudanic region. 12th Annual Sergei Starostin Memorial Conference on Comparative-Historical Linguistics (RSUH, March 23-24, 2017).

References

1. "Nilotic; Ethnologue".
2. "the definition of Nilotic". Dictionary.com. Retrieved 2016-10-26.
3. Payne, Doris. "Nilotic Family". pages.uoregon.edu. Retrieved 2016-10-26.
4. Barnard, Alan; Spencer, Jonathan (1996). Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Taylor & Francis. p. 10. ISBN 9780415099967.
5. Ki-Zerbo, Joseph (1981). Methodology and African Prehistory. UNESCO. p. 306. ISBN 9789231017070.
6. Roger Blench (2012) Nilo-Saharan language list
7. George Starostin (2015) The Eastern Sudanic hypothesis tested through lexicostatistics: current state of affairs (Draft 1.0)
8. Dimmendaal, Gerrit Jan. 1988. "The lexical reconstruction of proto-Nilotic: a first reconnaissance." Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere (AAP) 16: 5-67.
9. Chan, Eugene (2019). "The Nilo-Saharan Language Phylum". Numeral Systems of the World's Languages.

• Creider, Chet A. (1989). The syntax of the Nilotic languages: Themes and variations. Berlin: D. Reimer. ISBN 3-496-00483-5.

External links

• Nilotic, Michael Cysouw
• The Nilotic Language Family, Doris Payne

• Nilotic languages
• Language families
• Southern Eastern Sudanic languages
• Languages of Ethiopia
• Languages of Sudan
• Languages of South Sudan
• Languages of the Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Languages of Uganda
• Languages of Kenya
• Languages of Tanzania