The Nuer people are a Nilotic ethnic group concentrated in the Greater Upper Nile region of South Sudan. They also live in the Ethiopian region of Gambella. The Nuer speak the Nuer language, which belongs to the Nilotic language family. They are the second largest ethnic group in South Sudan. The Nuer people are pastoralists who herd cattle for a living. Their cattle serve as companions and define their lifestyle. The Nuer call themselves "Naath". Overview The Nuer people have historically been undercounted because of the semi-nomadic lifestyle. They also have a culture of counting only older members of the family. For example, the Nuer believe that counting the number of cattle one has could result in misfortune and prefer to report fewer children than they have. Their South Sudan counterparts are the Horn peninsula's westernmost Horners. History The Nuer people are said to have originally been a section of the Dinka people that migrated out of the Gezira south into a barren dry land that they called "Kwer Kwong", which was in southern Kordofan. Centuries of isolation and influence from Luo peoples caused them to be a distinct ethnic group from the Naath. The arrival of the Baggara and their subsequent slave raids in the late 1700s caused the Nuer to migrate from southern Kordofan into what is now Bentiu. In around 1850, further slave raids as well as flooding and overpopulation caused them to migrate even further out of Bentiu and eastwards all the way into the western fringes of Ethiopia, displacing and absorbing many Dinka, Anyuak and Burun in the process. British colonial expansion in the region during the 19th century greatly halted the Nuers aggressive territorial expansion against the Dinka and Anyuak. There are different accounts of the origin of the conflict between the Nuer and the Dinka, South Sudan's two largest ethnic groups. Anthropologist Peter J. Newcomer suggests that the Nuer and Dinka are actually similar. He argues that hundreds of years of population growth created expansion, which eventually led to raids and wars. In 2006 the Nuer and Murle were the tribes that resisted disarmament most strongly; members of the Nuer White Army, a group of armed youths often autonomous from tribal elders' authority, refused to lay down their weapons, which led SPLA soldiers to confiscate Nuer cattle, destroying their economy. The White Army was finally put down in mid-2006, though a successor organisation