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Nilo-Saharan was named by Greenberg to indicate the language phyla found along the Nile north from its origins in Lake Victoria to near where the Sudanese capital of Khar- toum stands at the confluence of the White and Blue Niles as well as a number of related languages that fan out into the Sahara, reaching as far as the Niger Bend in Mali, thus the name Nilo-Saharan. The American linguist Merritt Rehlun estimated that the total num- ber of Nilo-Saharan speakers was 11 million in 1987 (A Guide to the World’s Languages, 2nd ed.). There are four main families: Eastern Sudanic, Central Sudanic, Saharan, and Songhai, with another possible eight proposed as large family groups. Songhai is not fully accepted by a number of linguists, who think it should be considered as its own, sep- arate language group unrelated to any other. Khoisan or Click languages are spoken by perhaps less than 100,000 people today. Once widespread over much of southern and eastern Africa, the Khoisan peoples live in marginal areas of Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, and Tanzania. Greenberg invented the name taking it from Khoikhoi, the more acceptable local name for the Hottentots, and San, the more acceptable local name for the Bushmen. There is a good deal of debate over the validity of including certain language groups as Khoisan, but in general they are divided into two main families, Khoikhoi and San. Click languages make use of around 30 click consonants, and some of their Bantu neighbors have borrowed clicks into their languages over centuries of contact. Afro-Asiatic (formerly known as the Hamito-Semitic family) consists of 375 lan- guages still spoken today by over 350 million people in North Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Sahel and West Africa, and southwest Asia. The largest single language group today is Arabic, with an estimated 280 million speakers worldwide. Linguists do not agree about the subgroupings or families of Afro-Asiatic but, generally speaking, there are five with a possible sixth: Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, Chadic, and Cushitic, as well as Omotic, which Greenberg classified as part of Cushitic. Each of these is further broken down into a number of separate languages and then into smaller regional dialects. For example, Semitic includes Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, and Tigrinya. Arabic has some eight or nine major regional dialects (Maghribi, Hassani or that of Mauritania and the Western Sahara, Nile Valley, Levant, Iraq, Khaliji or Gulf, Najd or central Arabia, Hijaz or the west coast of the peninsula, and Yemen) and each of these is further divided into smaller regional dialects. Coptic is the only living Egyptian language today, and Arabic has replaced it as the medium of everyday communication. The term Indo-European was first coined by the English scholar Thomas Young in 1813, but the systematic and scientific comparative study of Indo-European languages began with the German linguists Franz Bopp and his major work Comparative Grammar, published between 1833 and 1852. Today there are some 443 languages classified as Indo-European with an estimated 3 billion speakers worldwide. The main subgroup found in the Middle East is the Iranian of the Indo-Iranian family, which includes Persian, Kurdish, Luri, and Bakhtiyari. Afrikaans is a recent development of Dutch and is an important language of southern Africa where an estimated 6.45 million speak Introduction: Ethnicity in Africa and the Middle East xix