Linguistic characteristics
The considerable typological diversity that characterizes the Nilo-Saharan languages corresponds to their wide geographic spread. Structural properties—for example, with respect to sound systems and word order—often are shared with unrelated neighbouring language groups. Thus, rich and complex consonant systems with universally rare distinctions—such as voiceless ejective versus voiced implosive consonants—are found, for example, in Koma, a Komuz language of western Ethiopia; comparable consonant distinctions occur in such Omotic (Afro-Asiatic) languages as Maale (southwestern Ethiopia). Several Central Sudanic languages, most of which are situated along the southern fringe of the Nilo-Saharan zone, share the presence of complex consonant systems with neighbouring Adamawa-Ubangi (Niger-Congo) languages. On the other hand, southern representatives of Nilotic have relatively simple consonant systems, as are common in neighbouring Bantu languages (which belong to the Niger-Congo language family). Such areal diffusion of properties usually results from extensive historical contacts and mutual borrowing not only of lexical items but also of structural features in situations of long-term bilingualism.
Areal features
Tone
Most Nilo-Saharan languages are tonal; i.e., they use relative pitch on a syllable or word to mark lexical or grammatical distinctions. A number of them—western varieties of Songhai or northern varieties of Nubian—border on nontonal languages and are themselves only marginally tonal. On the other hand, languages in central Africa, such as the western dialect of Lugbara (a Central Sudanic language spoken in the border area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda and bordering on highly tonal Niger-Congo languages), sometimes distinguish between as many as four tonal levels.
Vowel harmony
An additional areal feature, prominent especially in the Central Sudanic and in the Nilotic and Surmic groups of Eastern Sudanic and shared by neighbouring Niger-Congo languages, is that of vowel harmony. This feature restricts the co-occurrence in any given word of vowels that belong to more than one of two harmonic sets. Each of these harmonic sets includes five vowels, one set being produced with an advanced tongue root and the other with a retracted tongue root. In such Western Nilotic languages as Dinka, this contrast has developed further into a contrast between breathy voice and creaky (or hard) voice. Dinka has developed another universally rare feature, namely a three-way length distinction for vowels.
Word order
As observed by Greenberg in his language typology work, the position of the verb relative to the subject or object is known to correspond, in statistically significant ways, with other syntactic properties. Languages placing the verb before the subject and the object, for example, tend to have prepositions and auxiliaries preceding the main verb, whereas languages placing the verb after the subject and object tend to have postpositions and auxiliaries following the verb. Both of these typological extremes are represented in the Nilo-Saharan family. Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in the more eastern zones, such as many Nilotic and several Surmic languages as well as those belonging to the Kuliak and Kadu groups, belong to the former type, whereas western and northern Nilo-Saharan languages such as Fur, Kunama, and the Maban and Nubian languages have verb-final structures. Alternatively, word order is relatively free in some Surmic languages. It alternates between a verb–object order and auxiliary–object–verb order in Central Sudanic. Syntactic relations between constituents tend to be expressed by way of case-marking suffixes (or sometimes tonal inflection)—for example, for nominative, absolutive, accusative, genitive, dative, locative, associative, and instrumental case, although none of these necessarily co-occur in all languages at the same time.
Morphology
Apart from widespread lexical roots whose form and meaning relationships are similar, there are grammatical properties that clearly point toward a common historical origin for the Nilo-Saharan languages. Bari, a Nilotic language of South Sudan, demonstrates one widespread morphological property whereby either the singular or the plural form of a noun is expressed by the basic, morphologically simplex, form, as in rima’ ‘blood,’ rima-tat ‘a drop of blood’; nyɔmɔt ‘seeds,’ nyɔmɔt-ti; ‘seed’; Bari ‘Bari people (plural),’ Bari-nit ‘Bari person (singular).’ In addition, collective forms occur (e.g., nyɔmɔt-an ‘many kinds of seeds’), as do replacement patterns, a technique whereby both the singular and the plural are marked by way of number-marking suffixes (grammatical elements following the core or root of a word, as in the above examples). Such number-marking systems occur in a wide variety of Nilo-Saharan languages, usually in a plethora of forms. As several of the attested number-marking suffixes are similar or identical in form across languages, they most likely go back to a common ancestor.
Verbs
The verb tends to constitute the most complex aspect of Nilo-Saharan languages. It frequently involves extensive marking for conjugational features such as person, number, tense (the expression of time), aspect, or voice, with consonant mutation often accompanying such morphological processes. A widespread and rather permanent distinction is that between perfective/imperfective aspect verb stems in such distantly related groups as Saharan, Taman, Nyimang, and the Surmic languages. The verbal markers for causative, dative, and negation also tend to be similar in form. Furthermore, specific verbal inflectional features, such as the widespread forms for the first person singular (usually a verbal prefix a-) and second person singular (usually a verbal prefix i-), are best explained as retentions from a common ancestral language.
Gender
Gender distinctions between masculine and feminine (or neuter) nouns are common in the neighbouring Afro-Asiatic family (as they are in Indo-European languages) but not in Nilo-Saharan, which has only a few exceptions. Gender as a derivational property of nouns is found, for example, in Southern and Western Nilotic languages, whereas in the Eastern Nilotic languages it has developed into a fully inflectional property of nouns—i.e., all nouns are either inherently masculine or feminine; in a few Eastern Nilotic languages nouns may also have neuter gender as an inherent property. Early investigators of these easternmost representatives of Nilo-Saharan had claimed that these languages contained strong fundamental features from the “northern zone,” also known as Hamitic (and subsequently renamed Cushitic, now part of Afro-Asiatic). The extent and meaning of this so-called “Hamitic component” in Masai and other Nilotic languages was to become a major taxonomic issue at the beginning of the 20th century. The concept of language mixture (as an alternative to a uniform genetic classification into distinct language families) was defended most vigorously by the Africanist Carl Meinhof, who referred to these languages as “Nilo-Hamitic.” But, as Greenberg pointed out in his classificatory work, the mere presence of gender points only toward typological similarities between languages. What is at the heart of a genetic relationship (and a presumed common historical origin from the same ancestral language) is a resemblance between languages in sound and meaning for basic vocabulary items as well as in the form and function of grammatical markers.