Lotuko

Lotuko, better known as Otuho, is the Bari-language of the Otuho people of the Equatorian hills in South Sudan, with related varieties around the Imatong range. In a wider sense the name stands for the whole Eastern Nilotic spread, whose speakers began to diverge in the first millennium BC from a homeland in Equatoria and drifted south through the dry plains of the Rift Valley as cattle-keeping pastoralists.

The Turkana broke from the Ateker confederation and fought into the Lake Turkana basin, occupying it fully by the 1600s. The Maasai tongue spread through the Kenya and Tanzania grasslands in the eighteenth century amid the Iloikop wars.

The earlier Ongamo, also called Ngasa, reached the plains north of Kilimanjaro in the twelfth century, then lost ground over five centuries to incoming Bantu Chagga farmers, eventually abandoning their language for Chagga.