Nilotic peoples
| Regions with significant populations | |
|---|---|
| Nile Valley, African Great Lakes, Lake Chad, southwestern Ethiopia | |
| Languages | |
| Nilo-Saharan languages | |
| Religion | |
| Traditional faiths, Christianity |
Nilotic peoples are peoples indigenous to the Nile Valley who speak Nilotic languages; this is a large sub-group of the Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, and northern Tanzania. In a more general sense, the Nilotic peoples include all descendants of the original Nilo-Saharan speakers. Among these are the Luo, Sara, Maasai, Kalenjin, Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, Ateker, and the Maa-speaking peoples, each of which is a cluster of several ethnic groups.
The Nilotes constitute the majority of the population in South Sudan, an area that is believed to be their original point of dispersal. After the Bantu peoples, they constitute the second-largest group of peoples inhabiting the African Great Lakes region around the Eastern Great Rift. They make up a notable part of the population of southwestern Ethiopia as well.
The Nilote peoples primarily adhere to Christianity and traditional faiths, including the Dinka religion.
The terms Nilotic and Nilote were previously used as racial sub-classifications, based on anthropological observations of the distinct body morphology of many Nilotic speakers. Twentieth-century social scientists have largely discarded such efforts to classify peoples according to physical characteristics, in favor of using linguistic studies to distinguish among peoples. They formed ethnicities and cultures based on shared language. Since the late 20th century, however, social and physical scientists are making use of data from population genetics.
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