1 The Cambridge Handbook of African Linguistics, ed. by H. Ekkehard Wolff Chapter 11 Linguistic features and typologies in languages commonly referred to as ‘Nilo-Saharan’ Gerrit J. Dimmendaal, with Colleen Ahland, Angelika Jakobi, Constance Kutsch Lojenga 11.1 Introduction The phylum referred to today as Nilo-Saharan was established by Greenberg (1963). It consists of a core of language families already argued to be genetically related in his earlier classification of African languages (Greenberg 1955: 110-114), consisting of Eastern Sudanic, Central Sudanic, Kunama, and Berta, and grouped under the name Macrosudanic; this language family was renamed Chari-Nile in his 1963 contribution after a suggestion by the Africanist William Welmers. In his 1963 classification, Greenberg hypothesized that Nilo- Saharan consists of Chari-Nile and five other languages or language families treated as independent units in his earlier study: Songhay (Songhai), Saharan, Maban, Fur, and Koman (Coman). Bender (1997) also included the Kadu languages in Sudan in his survey of Nilo-Saharan languages; these were classified as members of the Kordofanian branch of Niger-Kordofanian by Greenberg (1963) under the name Tumtum. Although some progress has been made in our knowledge of the Kadu languages, they still remain relatively poorly studied, and therefore they are not further discussed here, also because actual historical evidence for their Nilo- Saharan affiliation is rather weak. Whereas there is a core of language groups now widely assumed to belong to Nilo- Saharan as a phylum or macro-family, the genetic affiliation of families such as Koman and Songhay is also disputed (as for the Kadu languages). For this reason, these latter groups are discussed separately from what is widely considered to form the core of Nilo-Saharan, Central Sudanic and, what is referred to here as, Northeastern Nilo-Saharan. This classification followed in the present chapter is not just a replication of Greenberg (1955) because in the latter study (Eastern) Saharan, Maban, Fur, Temainian, Berta, Kunama, and Nyangiya were classified as independent language families, whereas these are treated as subgroups of Northeastern Nilo-Saharan in the present study, based on several widespread cognate grammatical markers that point towards their common genetic origin. 1 The name Nyangiya is replaced by the name Kuliak in the present chapter (and is referred to as Rub by Ehret 2001 in his historical-comparative study of Nilo-Saharan). It forms a primary branch of Northeastern 1 Greenberg (1963: 130) included two languages which are probably extinct now and which are known basically from short wordlists as “Mimi of Nachtigal” and “Mimi of Gaudefroy-Demombynes” in his Maban group. These are treated as linguistic isolates in the present contribution (see also Chapter 7 on comparative linguistics for further discussion).