Ongamo, or Ngasa, is an endangered or extinct Eastern Nilotic

Eastern Nilotic languages

The Eastern Nilotic languages are one of the three primary branches of the Nilotic languages, themselves belonging to the Eastern Sudanic subfamily of Nilo-Saharan; they are believed to have begun to diverge about 3,000 years ago, and have spread southwards from an original home in Equatoria in...

 language of the Ngasa people of Tanzania

Tanzania

The United Republic of Tanzania is a country in East Africa bordered by Kenya and Uganda to the north, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west, and Zambia, Malawi, and Mozambique to the south. The country's eastern borders lie on the Indian Ocean.Tanzania is a state...

. It is related to the Maa languages

Maa languages

The Maa languages are a group of closely related Eastern Nilotic languages spoken in parts of Kenya and Tanzania by more than a million speakers altogether. They are subdivided into North and South Maa...

, but it is more distantly related to them than the Maa languages are to each other. Ongamo has 60% of lexical similarity with Maasai

Maasai language

The Maasai language is an Eastern Nilotic language spoken in Southern Kenya and Northern Tanzania by the Maasai people, numbering about 800,000...

, 59% with Samburu

Samburu language

Samburu is the Eastern Nilotic, North Maa language spoken by the Samburu in the highlands of northern Kenya. The Samburu number about 128,000 . Samburu is closely related to Camus and to the South Maa language Maasai...

, 58% with Camus. Many of its speakers have shifted to Chagga, a dominant regional Bantu language

Bantu languages

The Bantu languages constitute a traditional sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages...

.