Nilo-Saharan

Nilo-Saharan is a proposed language family of approximately 200 languages spoken by roughly 50–60 million people across a broad band of northeastern and north-central Africa, from Mali and Niger in the west to Tanzania and Kenya in the east, with concentrations in Sudan, South Sudan, Chad, Uganda, and Ethiopia. The family's internal coherence is among the most contested in African linguistics: while scholars broadly agree on a core grouping, the inclusion of some branches (such as Songhay) remains disputed, and the family may prove to be a genealogical unit, an areal grouping, or several unrelated families.

The most securely established subgroup within Nilo-Saharan is the Nilotic branch, which includes Dinka, Nuer, Maasai, Luo, and Acholi. The Nilotes are associated with a cattle-herding and semi-pastoral way of life and have been historically dominant across the upper Nile basin and the East African Rift Valley. Ancient DNA from East African pastoral sites dated to around 3000–1000 BCE shows a population with substantial ancestry from the middle Nile corridor, consistent with a southward expansion of Nilotic or related populations into eastern Africa.

The Maasai, one of the most recognisable pastoral peoples of East Africa, speak an Eastern Nilotic language (Maa) and genetically derive from a mixture of Nilo-Saharan-related pastoralists and pre-existing East African populations. Their expansion southward into the East African Rift Valley occurred within approximately the past 1,000 years, displacing or absorbing earlier agropastoral populations. The Songhay languages of the Niger Bend (spoken in Mali and Niger, including Zarma) have a complex history: the Songhay Empire (c. 1464–1591 CE) was one of the largest pre-colonial African states, and its language spread as a trade and administrative medium across a wide region.

The Nubian languages of Sudan and southern Egypt represent an ancient stratum of Nilo-Saharan, possibly related to the ancient Meroitic language of the kingdom of Kush and Meroe, though Meroitic itself remains only partially deciphered. The relationship between the modern Nubian languages and the ancient populations of the Nile corridor — who interacted directly with Pharaonic Egypt for millennia — is a subject of active research combining linguistics, archaeology, and ancient genomics.