Summary

Chadic is above all a linguistic category. It includes a number of languages belonging to the Afro-Asiatic linguistic family and located almost exclusively in the Chad basin in North central Africa. Chadic languages are distributed in in three regional clusters, each divided in to part: Western Chadic with northwest and southeast sub-clusters, Central Chadic with southern and northern sub-cluster, and finally, Eastern Chadic with southwestern and northeastern sub-clusters. The history of settlement, expansion, and socio-cultural evolution of speakers of Chadic languages is intimately the consequences of climate change on Lake Chad and the Chad basin. Converging results of genomic research point to the Eastern African origins of Ancestral Chadic. Groups of Ancestral Chadic migrated along the tributaries of the Shari River, forming the Proto-Chadic Homeland in the southeast of the Mid-Holocene Lake Chad. These Early Chadic speaking communities drifted northeastward, northward, and northwestward, initially as pastoral nomadic groups, then sedentary mixed-farmers. The socio-political systems changed radically during the first half of the second millennium CE, from 1000 to 1500 CE, presiding over the emergence hierarchical and centralized polities in Western and Central Chadic areas.