|Central and East Africa|
|Linguistic classification:||One of the world's primary language families|
|ISO 639-2 and 639-5:||ssa|
Map showing the distribution of Nilo-Saharan languages
The Nilo-Saharan languages are a family of African languages. They are spoken by around 50 million people, who mainly live in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers. The languages go through 17 countries in the northern half of Africa: from Algeria to Benin in the west; from Libya to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the center; and from Egypt to Tanzania in the east.