African Ethnic Groups (Public Content)

Ethnic Groups of Africa

Source: Africa Ethnic Groups
Data Source: Murdock, G. P. 1959. Africa, Its Peoples and Their Culture History. McGraw Hill.
Usage Notes/Copyright Status: This work is in the public domain in the United States under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the US Code.
Date Downloaded: 1996

Map Description:
This map displays the ethnic groups of Africa as researched by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in 1996. Areas with large populations of two or more major ethnic groups have been represented with one feature being superimposed over the other as represented by the Shared Areas layer.

Please note that the classification presented does not reflect current scholarly consensus.

Note: Scanned or downloaded images have been geo-registered for compatibility with our project interface. Slight imperfections are an inevitable result of the registration process. View original image(s) to see the unaltered map(s).

Influential Eastern Nilotic Migrations (Newman)

Influential Eastern Nilotic Migrations

Source: Newman, James L. 1995. The Peopling of Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press. 171.
Date Digitized: 2009

Map Description:
According to James L. Newman, the interior of East Africa is one of the most complex ethnolinguistic regions on the continent, due to the continuous movement of groups, including Khoisan, Cushitic, Nilotic and Bantu peoples. As he states in his book, the most influential migrations were those of the Eastern Nilotes. Despite the characterization of their encounters with other cultures as hostile and often violent, it was more common for groups to be gradually displaced or absorbed, with some maintaining independence and coexisting. Such was the case with the Southern Cushites, who were displaced over time, and the Kalenjins, who were assimilated into Bantu society (Newman).

Other LL-MAP resources related to this project:
Eastern and Southern Cushites Introduce Food-Producing Economies to the Interior Mosaic (Newman)
Southern Nilotic Speakers Seeking the Kenyan Highlands(Newman)
Bantu Colonization of the Interior Mosiac of Africa (Newman)
Ngoni, Kamba, Arab-Swahili, and Yao Movements, Migrations, and Trade Routes Within the Interior Mosiac (Newman)

Note: Scanned or downloaded images have been geo-registered for compatibility with our project interface. Slight imperfections are an inevitable result of the registration process. View original image(s) to see the unaltered map(s).

North Africa: Nilo-Saharan in Northern Africa

Nilo-Saharan in Northern Africa

Data Source: Irvine, A. K. and David Appleyard. 2007. "The Middle East and North Africa". In R. E. Asher & Christopher Moseley (eds.). Atlas of the World’s Languages. Oxford: Routledge.

"Nilo-Saharan: Composite 2010". MultiTree: A Digital Library of Language Relationships

Date Digitized: May 2011.

Map Description:
The areas pictured display locations of where Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken today. Ranging from Egypt and the White Nile to Uganda and Sudan, Irvine and Appleyard (2007) estimate that there are approximately 90 distinct living languages and dialect clusters. This number varies widely, however, and as further research is done and the complexity of the classification system of the family increases, more languages are being discovered (Irvine and Appleyard 2007).

This original map was made by vectorizing data from the MultiTree language database and the Atlas of the World's Languages.

Other resources related to this project:
This folder (Northern African Languages) contains other maps showing linguistic subgroups. The maps may be overlaid on each other for a more complete picture.