The Nilo-Saharan language family includes 204 extremely diverse languages spoken by roughly 35 million people in the interior

of northern Africa, including the greater Nile basin and its tributaries, as well as the central region of the Sahara desert.

Nilo-Saharan languages, a group of languages that form one of the four language stocks or families on the African continent, the others being Afro-Asiatic, Khoisan, and NigerCongo. The Nilo-Saharan languages are presumed to be descended from a common ancestral language and, therefore, to be genetically related. The family covers major areas east and north of Lake Victoria in East Africa and extends westward as far as the Niger valley in Mali, West Africa. Its genetic unity was first proposed in a classificatory study dating from 1963 by the American linguist and anthropologist Joseph H. Greenberg.

Scholars have argued for over 100 years about the best way to classify Nilo-Saharan languages. Today, many accept the genetic unity of the Nilo-Saharan languages as proposed in 1963 by Joseph Greenberg, an American anthropologist and linguist. Ethnologue follows Greenbergs classification by including the following branches of the Nilo-Saharan family. However, there remains some disagreement about the membership within the branches themselves. As you can see from the table below, the Central and Eastern Sudanic branches account for the majority of Nilo-Saharan languages (160 languages).

Branch

Number of languages

Berta
Central Sudanic Eastern Sudanic Komuz Kunama

1
65 95 6 1

Maban
Saharan Songhai Fur

9
9 8 3