Ni·lo-Sa·har·an

(nī′lō-sə-hăr′ən, -hä′rən)

A language family of sub-Saharan Africa spoken in the interior from Nigeria to Kenya and including Kanuri, Nubian, and the Nilotic languages.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Nilo-Saharan

(ˌnaɪləʊsəˈhɑːrən)

(Languages) 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

adj

(Languages) relating to or belonging to this family of languages

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ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Noun

Nilo-Saharan - a family of East African languages spoken by Nilotic peoples from the Sahara south to Kenya and Tanzania

Nilo-Saharan language

natural language, tongue - a human written or spoken language used by a community; opposed to e.g. a computer language

Chari-Nile - a group of Nilo-Saharan language spoken in parts of the Sudan and Zaire and Uganda and Tanzania

Saharan - a Nilo-Saharan language spoken in parts of Chad

Songhai - a Nilo-Saharan language spoken by the Songhai in Mali and Niger

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References in periodicals archive

Expressions of time--tense and aspect--are little discussed in most grammatical description of Cushitic, Ethio-Semitic, Nilo-Saharan, and Omotic languages spoken at the Horn of Africa, so linguists here seek to fill the void.

Time in Languages of the Horn of Africa

Whereas the first event is expressed by means of a lexical root, the second is expressed by means of a derivational suffix, as I will show for the Afroasiatic Chadic language Hausa (Section 2.1), the Niger-Congo language Tima (Section 2.2), and a number of Nilo-Saharan Nilotic languages (Section 2.3).

Alloying as an economy principle in morphology

in Ethiopia, offers an extended study of ethnobotany in this work, where plant names and uses are compiled for the Awi, Gumuz, and Shinasha people of Ethiopia, who speak, respectively, languages in the Cushitic, Nilo-Saharan, and Omotic families.

Wild plant nomenclature and traditional botanical knowledge among three ethnolinguistic groups in northwestern Ethiopia

Their language, Tebu, is a member of the Nilo-Saharan language family.

South Sudan triumphs in spite of conspiracies

The topic of Akkadian and Amorite has very smartly been reduced to simply Akkadian, Jewish Palestinian Aramaic has been replaced with Baby-Ionian Jewish Aramaic, and the chapter on Nilo-Saharan languages has become focused on a single language, Kanuri.

Morphologies of Asia and Africa