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Glite Dictionary
🌊 Of the Nile region 📚 About these languages 🗣️ East African languages
Nilotic

Nilotic

9.9
A group of languages spoken in East Africa like Luo
  • noun
  • /nɪˈlɒtɪk/
  • Specialized
: nilótico
  • The Nilotic languages include Dinka and Nuer, which are primarily spoken in South Sudan.

Examples

  • Linguists study the structure of Nilotic languages to understand their unique features.

  • Many Nilotic speakers express their cultural identity through traditional music and storytelling.

  • As is now well known, Western race theory of the colonial period held that Hutu and Tutsi were different peoples by nature, representatives of the larger and equally distinct "Bantu" and "Nilotic" groups (see Mamdani 2001:76-102 for a full account of the "Hamitic" theory).

    Academic text (2005)

Compounds

Nilotic language
  • Specialized
1 9.9

A language spoken in East Africa by groups such as the Maasai and Dinka

Surface Forms

Nilotic singular
Nilotics plural

Morphology

Nilotic = Nile (transparent) = Nile + ic

Formed from the geographic name 'Nile' plus the adjective-forming suffix '-ic', meaning 'related to the Nile' and extended to languages named for that region.

Etymology

Nilotic comes from the name Nile plus the ending -otic, and it originally means 'of the Nile'. A helpful way to remember it is that Nilotic languages are the languages of people who live by the Nile, which is why linguists call that group 'Nilotic'.