Nilo-Saharan

[ nahy-loh-suh-har-uhn, -hair-, -hahr- ]

noun

1. a family of African languages, including the Central and Eastern Sudanic groups as well as Kanuri, Songhai, and other languages, spoken from the Sahara southward to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tanzania.

Nilo-Saharan

/ ˌnaɪləʊsəˈhɑːrən /

noun

1. a family of languages of Africa, spoken chiefly by Nilotic peoples in a region extending from the Sahara to Kenya and Tanzania, including the Chari-Nile, Saharan, Songhai, and other branches. Classification is complicated by the fact that many languages spoken in this region belong to the unrelated Afro-Asiatic, Kordofanian, and Niger-Congo families

adjective

1. relating to or belonging to this family of languages

Example Sentences

Thus, the evidence derived from plant names in modern African languages permits us to glimpse the existence of three languages being spoken in Africa thousands of years ago: ancestral Nilo-Saharan, ancestral Niger-Congo, and ancestral Afroasiatic.

From Literature

In particular, Afroasiatic speakers mostly prove to be people who would be classified as whites or blacks, Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo speakers prove to be blacks, Khoisan speakers Khoisan, and Austronesian speakers Indonesian.

From Literature

Here they encountered a melting pot of Afroasiatic and Nilo-Saharan farmers and herders growing millet and sorghum and raising livestock in drier areas, along with Khoisan hunter-gatherers.

From Literature

In East Africa they still had to compete against numerous Nilo-Saharan and Afroasiatic Iron Age farmers.

From Literature

The fragmented distribution of Nilo-Saharan languages in Figure 19.2 similarly implies that many speakers of those languages have been engulfed by speakers of Afroasiatic or Niger-Congo languages.

From Literature