Nilo-Saharan languages

Nilo-Saharan is a proposed language family grouping languages spoken across parts of central and eastern Africa. Its unity and internal classification remain disputed.

Language family: A group of languages descended from a common ancestral language. Nilo-Saharan is proposed as a family whose shared ancestry remains contested.
Niger-Congo languages: A major proposed language family spoken across much of sub-Saharan Africa. Some languages near the proposed Nilo-Saharan boundary have been classified differently in Niger-Congo.
Nubian languages: A group of languages spoken mainly in Sudan and southern Egypt. Nubian is commonly placed within the proposed Nilo-Saharan family.
Carl Meinhof: A German linguist who studied and classified African languages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His earlier classifications formed part of the scholarly background to later African family proposals.
Language classification in Africa: The organization of African languages into proposed genealogical families and branches. Nilo-Saharan is one of the major groupings used in maps and surveys of African languages.
Historical linguistics: The study of how languages change and how their historical relationships can be reconstructed. Its comparative methods are used to test whether Nilo-Saharan languages share an ancestor.
Afroasiatic languages: A language family including Semitic, Berber, Cushitic, Chadic, and other branches. Afroasiatic is a neighboring family with a more widely accepted genealogical classification.
Nilotic languages: A group of languages spoken chiefly in South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. Nilotic is one of the largest and most studied proposed branches.
Diedrich Westermann: A German linguist known for research on African languages, especially those of West Africa. His work shaped early twentieth-century attempts to classify African languages.
African historical linguistics: The study of the historical development and relationships of African languages. Debates over Nilo-Saharan affect reconstructions of language history across central and eastern Africa.

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