Shatt language

The Shatt language is a Daju language of the Eastern Daju family spoken by the Shatt people in the Shatt Hills (part of the Nuba Mountains) southwest of Kaduqli in South Kordofan province in southern Sudan.

Villages are Shatt Daman, Shatt Safia, and Shatt Tebeldia (Ethnologue, 22nd edition).

The designation "Shatt" is an Arabic word meaning "dispersed" and is applied to several distinct groups in the Nuba Mountains. "Caning" is their own name for themselves, linguistically referred to as endonym, whereas "Shatt" is considered an exonym due to its external ascription. Speakers refer to their language as ìkkɨ̀ cánnìñ ('mouth, language').

• /x/ may vary between velar [x] or uvular [χ] fricative sounds.
• A glottal stop [ʔ] may also occur, only in intervocalic positions.

• /ə/ is phonetically raised as [ə̝].
• Sounds /e, o/ may also be heard as [ɛ, ɔ].

The alphabet consists of 27 letters, which are shown in the table below with the corresponding letter from the International Phonetic Alphabet chart.

The grammar in this section is primarily based on the Caning Grammar Book (Second Edition 2017).

A noun in Caning "can be a person, animal, place, thing, or idea."

Plurals in Caning are built in three different ways:

1. By adding a suffix to the singular.
2. By adding a suffix to the plural.
3. By adding a suffix to both, the singular and the plural form.

When adding a singular suffix only as described in form one, the plural form remains unchanged.

For the second for, when adding the plural suffix only, the singular form remains unchanged.

Certain patterns occur in pairs for the respective singular and plural forms, as described in form three.

There are exceptions to the rule, e.g. words that change form, having a shorter plural than singular form or no singular or plural form at all.

Some nouns only occur as plurals, e.g. noncountable nouns that refer to masses or liquids:

It is noteworthy that Caning has two forms of the pronoun "we" (1st person plural) that could be distinguished by calling them inclusive and exclusive versions. One being -was (we - not you) and the other one being -kog (we - and you).

This difference is also made with the possessor and possessive pronouns us/our(s).

Possessor pronouns can replace the possessor (apang = man) in the sentence below.

"Kig kasax axä apang. Person refused hut of man.

Kig kasax axang. Person refused my hut." (ax = hut)

Possessive Pronouns can also replace nouns.

By using the same example, the difference between possessor and possessive pronouns become more clear.

"Kig kasax axä apang. Person refused hut of man.

Kig kasax nämanggo. Person refused his." (ax = hut)

All of the possessive pronouns below can therefore take the place of nämanggo in the above sentence.

Intermediate numbers, e.g. 785 are built similar to English, from front to end: udiny mädäginy paxtänding (700) wang (and) udiny tesped (80) wang (and) mädäg (5).

The following table shows how ordinal numbers are built.

Numbers usually come after the noun with a modifier suffix, in this case -eneng.

• Ethnologue Language map for Nuba Hills region of Sudan
• Huffman, Steve. "Language Map of Sudan" (PDF). www.worldgeodatasets.com. Archived from the original on July 5, 2017.
• Caning (Shatt) basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
• Caning to English online dictionary from webonary
• English to Caning online dictionary with over 1,300 entries from webonary