Eastern Sudanic languages

In most classifications, the Eastern Sudanic languages are a group of nine families of languages that may constitute a branch of the Nilo-Saharan language family. Eastern Sudanic languages are spoken from southern Egypt to northern Tanzania.

Nubian (and possibly Meroitic) gives Eastern Sudanic some of the earliest written attestations of African languages. However, the largest branch by far is Nilotic, spread by extensive and comparatively recent conquests throughout East Africa. Before the spread of Nilotic, Eastern Sudanic was centered in present-day Sudan. The name "East Sudanic" refers to the eastern part of the region of Sudan where the country of Sudan is located, and contrasts with Central Sudanic and Western Sudanic (modern Mande, in the Niger–Congo family).

Lionel Bender (1980) proposes several Eastern Sudanic isoglosses (defining words), such as *kutuk "mouth", *(ko)TVS-(Vg) "three", and *ku-lug-ut or *kVl(t) "fish".

In older classifications, such as that of Meinhof (1911), the term was used for the eastern Sudanic languages, largely equivalent to modern Nilo-Saharan sans Nilotic, which is the largest constituent of modern Eastern Sudanic.

Güldemann (2018, 2022) considers East Sudanic to be undemonstrated at the current state of research. He only accepts the evidence for a connection between the Nilotic and Surmic languages as "robust", and states that Rilly's evidence (see below) for the northern group comprising Nubian, Nara, Nyima, Taman and Meroitic "certainly look[s] promising". He finds the Southern East Sudanic unit (comprising Nilotic, Surmic, Jebel, Temein and Daju) typologically coherent and, with the exclusion of Daju, showing likely correspondences among personal pronouns. Glottolog (2023) does not accept even a Surmic–Nilotic relationship.

The putative Eastern Sudanic languages are "surprisingly diverse" and resemble in this the larger Nilo-Saharan proposal. No common typological features unify them. A set of head-initial languages corresponds largely with the Southern group (typologically similar to also e.g. the Kadu and Central Sudanic families), and a set of head-final languages corresponds largely with the Northern group (typologically similar to also e.g. the Maban and Saharan families). Typological difference, however, does not preclude a relationship, and typological similarities with nearby certainly or likely unrelated languages suggests that these similarities might be partly areal. Omotic and Cushitic, in particular, are nearby head-final families belonging instead in the large Afro-Asiatic phylum and forming the Ethiopian language area.

There are several different classifications of East Sudanic languages.

Lionel Bender assigns the languages into two branches, depending on whether the 1st person singular pronoun ("I") has a /k/ or an /n/: