The Nilotic languages are languages spoken across wide areas between Egypt, Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania by the Nilotic peoples.
The word Nilotic means of or relating to the Nile River or to the Nile region of Africa. The Nile River runs from Rwanda through various countries down to Egypt.
Nilotic peoples, who are the native speakers of the languages, originally migrated from the Gezira area in Sudan. Nilotic language speakers live in parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda.
According to linguist Joseph Greenberg, the language family is divided up into three subgroups:
These Nilotic languages' groupings are geographical classifications rather than mutual intelligibility. For instance, the Dinka is a different language from the Luo, which is also different from Nuer etc. Some words may sound similar due to shared location although these are distinct ethnic groups, with distinct speeches. Dinka and Nuer languages are not mutually intelligible but they share a common vocabulary since both languages are related Western Nilotic languages.
Before Greenberg's reclassification, Nilotic was used to refer to Western Nilotic alone, with the other two being grouped as related "Nilo-Hamitic" languages.
Blench (2012) treats the Burun languages as a fourth subgroup of Nilotic. In previous classifications, the languages were included within the Luo languages. Starostin (2015) treats the Mabaan-Burun languages as "West Nilotic" but outside the Luo level.
Over 200 Proto-Nilotic lexical roots have been reconstructed by Dimmendaal (1988). Dimmendaal reconstructs the Proto-Nilotic consonants as follows:
Comparison of numerals in individual languages: