The Northern Eastern Sudanic, Eastern ''k'' Sudanic, ''Ek'' Sudanic, NNT or Astaboran languages may form a primary division of the yet-to-be-demonstrated
Eastern Sudanic family. They are characterised by having a /
k/ in the first person singular pronoun "I/me", as opposed to the
Southern Eastern Sudanic languages, which have an /
n/.
Nyima has yet to be conclusively linked to the other languages, and would appear to be the closest relative of ''Ek'' Sudanic rather than ''Ek'' Sudanic proper.
The most well-known language of this group is
Nubian. According to
Claude Rilly, the ancient
Meroitic language
The Meroitic language () was spoken in Meroë (in present-day Sudan) during the Meroitic period (attested from 300 BCE) and became extinct about 400 CE. It was written in two forms of the Meroitic alphabet: Meroitic Cursive, which was written ...
appears on limited evidence to be closest to languages of this group.
A reconstruction of Proto-Northern Eastern Sudanic has also been proposed by Rilly (2010: 347-349).
Internal classification
Rilly (2009:2)
[Rilly, Claude. 2009. ''From the Yellow Nile to the Blue Nile: The quest for water and the diffusion of Northern East Sudanic languages from the fourth to the first millennia BCE''. Paper presented at ECAS 2009 (3rd European Conference on African Studies, Panel 142: African waters - water in Africa, barriers, paths, and resources: their impact on language, literature and history of people) in Leipzig, 4 to 7 June 2009.] provides the following internal structure for the Northern Eastern Sudanic languages.
;Northern East Sudanic
*
Nyima: Nyimang, Afitti
*
Taman: Tama, Mararit
*Nara-Nubian
**
Nara
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is an " independent federal agency of the United States government within the executive branch", charged with the preservation and documentation of government and historical records. It ...
**Meroitic-Nubian
***
Meroitic
***
Nubian
****Western Nubian
*****Birgid
*****Midob, Kordofan Nubian
****Nile Nubian
*****Old Dongolawi, Kenuzi, Dongolawi
*****Old Nubian, Nobiin
External relationships
Based on morphological evidence such as tripartite number marking on nominals,
Roger Blench
Roger Marsh Blench (born August 1, 1953) is a British linguist, ethnomusicologist and development anthropologist. He has an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and is based in Cambridge, England. He researches, publishes, and wor ...
(2021) suggests that the
Maban languages may be closely related.
[Blench, Roger. 2021. ]
The Maban languages and their place within Nilo-Saharan
'.
See also
*
List of Northern Eastern Sudanic reconstructions (Wiktionary)
References
* M. L. Bender, 2000. "Nilo-Saharan". In ''African Languages: An Introduction'', edited by Bernd Heine and Derek Nurse. Cambridge University Press.
*George Starostin (2015
The Eastern Sudanic hypothesis tested through lexicostatistics: current state of affairs(Draft 1.0)
*
{{Eastern Sudanic languages
Eastern Sudanic languages
Proposed language families