NILO-SAHARAN LANGUAGES

group of languages presumed to be genetically interrelated, or descended from a common ancestral language. Joseph Greenberg proposed the Chari-Nile family as part of his overall classification of African languages. At first, he designated the group by the name Macro-Sudanic (1955), but in 1963 adopted the term Chari-Nile. The name Chari-Nile is geographically descriptive in that virtually all the languages in the family are located in the watersheds of the Nile and the Chari rivers or in the areas in between them. Additional reading Mervyn W.H. Beech, The Suk: Their Language and Folklore, with introduction by Sir Charles Eliot (1911); Margaret A. Bryan, The T/K Languages: A New Substratum, Africa, 29:121 (1959); The *N/*K Languages of Africa, J. Afr. Lang., 7:169217 (1968); Morris Goodman, Some Questions on the Classification of African Languages, Int. J. Am. Linguistics, 36:117122 (1970); Oswin Khler, Geschichte der Erforschung der Nilotischen Sprachen, Afrika und bersee, vol. 28 (1955), a history of the investigation of the Nilotic languages, including Nilo-Hamitic, and suggesting a new subgrouping; G.W. Murray, The Nilotic Languages: A Comparative Survey, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 50:327368 (1920), an attempt to prove the common ancestry of Nubian, Bari, Masai, and Shilluk peoples; P.L. Shinnie, Meroe: A Civilization of the Sudan (1967), includes a discussion of the Meroitic language; Bruce G. Trigger, Meroitic and Eastern Sudanic: A Linguistic Relationship?, Kush, 12:188194 (1964); Archibald N. Tucker, The Eastern Sudanic Languages (1940), compares, among others, the languages renamed Central Sudanic by Greenberg and concentrates on the Moru-Madi group and Lendu; Diedrich Westermann, The Shilluk People: Their Language and Folklore (1912), discusses the classification of the Nilotic languages. Morris F. Goodman