| Masalit | |
|---|---|
| kana masalaka/masaraka | |
| Native to | Sudan, Chad |
| Region | West Darfur, South Darfur (Sudan), Ouaddaï Region (Chad) |
| Ethnicity | Masalit |
Native speakers | 440,000 (2011-2013)[1] |
Nilo-Saharan?
| |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | Either:mls – Masalitmdg – Massalat |
| Glottolog | nucl1440 Nuclear Masalitmass1262 Massalat |
Masalit (autonym Masala/Masara) (Arabic: ماساليت) is a language spoken by the Masalit people in western Darfur, Sudan.
Masalit, known as the Massalat moved west into central-eastern Chad. Their ethnic population in Chad was 30,000 as of the 1993 census, but only 10 speakers of their language were reported in 1991.[2]
Sociolects
The Masalit language has two sociolects:
- "Heavy" Masalit, spoken by higher-ranking people and those in the countryside, with a complicated agglutinative grammar
- "Light" Masalit, spoken particularly in the home and in the market, with a somewhat simplified grammatical structure and many borrowings from Sudanese Arabic, the regional lingua franca and language of education.
References
- ^ "Masalit". Ethnologue. Retrieved 2018-09-14.
- ^ Masalit language at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
External links
Further reading
- Abdo, Alsadig Adam (2013). "Contrastive Analysis Between Masalit and English Language" (PDF). (in Masalit and English). University of Khartoum, Sadan: unpublished. Retrieved 8 May 2015.
- Edgar, J. (1990). Masalit stories. African Languages and Cultures, 3(2), 127-148.
- Jakobi, A. (1991). Au Masali Grammar: With Notes on Other Languages of Darfur and Wadai. Anthropos, 86(4-6), 599-601.