Week 9: Macro-Central Sudanic

While in a previous blog post, I had concluded that there wasn’t much support for a linguistic connection between the Central Sudanic and Eastern Sudanic families of Nilo-Saharan, that doesn’t inherently mean that the families in question are not related to any of the other families included in Nilo-Saharan. In a recent post, I suggested that the Fur and Kuliak families were in all likelihood related to Eastern Sudanic, and in this post, I intend to take a look at the languages which could potentially be related to Central Sudanic.

The languages which I was most interested in examining were of the Kunama and Maban families. Both of these families were marked as being potentially related to Central Sudanic within Starostin’s model. When I first saw this comparison by Starostin, the inclusion of Maban made a lot of sense, as all of the Maban languages are located within the nation of Chad, and while they’re located further south, there do exist some Central Sudanic languages in Chad as well. The inclusion of Kunama, however, drew a bit more suspicion, as the Kunama family–which is made up of only one language, also called Kunama–is located entirely within the nation of Eritrea, quite a distance away from the confluence of most Central Sudanic languages. Nevertheless, I understood that geographical distance is not what makes or breaks the validity of linguistic grouping, what matters most is the language itself.

The languages I decided to compare in this particular instance were Lugbara of Central Sudanic, Maba of Maban, which is the most spoken of the Maban languages and also their namesake, and Kunama of Kunama. I was able to once again utilize the ASJP database for the compiling of my Kunama word list, but unfortunately, the database was unable to yield any word list for Maba with more than sixty words. Luckily, I was able to find another word list for Maba which eclipsed 250 words. Unluckily, that word list had been compiled by one of my sworn linguistic enemies, Roger Blench, a proponent of Nilo-Saharan who apparently doesn’t believe in the Swadesh list as it seems like he chose many of the words in the list at random. Nevertheless, the list was expansive enough for me to make an adequate use of it–and I must say, it was very useful. When initially comparing Lugbara and Kunama, I found a significant number of similarities, but I wasn’t sure if it was quite enough to deem them a united family, especially considering their geographic discrepancy. However, when I included Maba in my comparison, the tables began to turn, as it was able to effectively act as a stepping stone between the more distant languages, sharing many similarities with both of them and leading me to believe that the three families may be one.

Below, I’ve provided a chart which displays many of the similarities in vocabulary I found between the selected languages. For the purpose of this project, I will be using the term ‘Macro-Central Sudanic’ to describe this united family.

Sources:

Blench, Roger. “The Maban languages and their place within Nilo-Saharan.” (2021)

Bender, Marvin Lionel. 2001. English-Kunama lexicon. Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere 65. 201-253.; Bender, M. Lionel. 1996. Kunama (Languages of the World/Materials 59). München: Lincom.; Bender, M. Lionel. 1971. The languages of Ethiopia: A new lexicostatistic classification and some problems of diffusion. Anthropological Linguistics 13. 165-288.