Luo

Luo, or Lwo, is the western branch of the Nilotic family spoken by related peoples from southern Sudan and western Ethiopia through Uganda and the eastern Congo to Lake Victoria in Kenya, where Dholuo reaches into northern Tanzania. The Luo languages divide into Northern and Southern groups, the southern varieties close enough to be mutually intelligible.

Their speakers began to split from a Nilotic homeland in the Bahr el Ghazal region during the early second millennium, their southward migration hastened by the Muslim conquest of the Sudan. In the mid-1400s the chief Nyikango led his followers north along the Nile to found the Shilluk kingdom.

Other Luo groups moved south to become the Acholi, Alur and Joluo. In the early 1800s these languages were still unwritten, their literature carried by oral tradition.