Masalit language

Masalit (autonym Masala/Masara; Arabic: ماساليت) is a Nilo-Saharan language of the Maban language group spoken by the Masalit people in Ouaddaï Region, Chad and West 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.

Phonology

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

Further reading

• Abdo, Alsadig Adam (November 2013). "Contrastive analysis between Masalit and English language" (PDF). Department of Linguistics. University of Khartoum. Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 March 2016.
• Edgar, John (January 1990). "Masalit stories". African Languages and Cultures. 3 (2). Taylor & Francis: 127–148. doi:10.1080/09544169008717716. JSTOR 1771718.
• Jakobi, Angelika (1991). "Edgar, John: A Masalit Grammar. With Notes on Other Languages of Darfur and Wadai. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1989. 121 pp., map, tab., fig. (Sprache und Oralität in Afrika, 3) Preis: DM 59-". Anthropos (in German). 86 (4–6). Nomos Verlag: 599–601. JSTOR 40463695.

External links

• The Lost Languages, Found in New York - NYTimes.com