Masalit language
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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
Vowels
Consonants
| Labial | Dental/ Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | ŋ | ||
| Stop/ Affricate | voiceless | p | t | t͡ʃ | k | |
| voiced | b | d | d͡ʒ | g | ||
| prenasal | ᵐb | ⁿd | ⁿd͡ʒ | ᵑɡ | ||
| Fricative | voiceless | f | s | ʃ | (x) | h |
| voiced | v | (z) | ||||
| Trill | r | |||||
| Lateral | l | |||||
| Approximant | labial | ɥ | w | |||
| central | j |
- It has been stated that occasional click sounds [ǀ] and [ǃ] may occur, however; they are considered to be rare.
- Sounds /r,l,m,k/ can occur as geminated [rː,lː,mː,kː].
- Sounds /t, m, n, ŋ/ can occur as palatalized [tʲ, mʲ, nʲ, ŋʲ] before front vowels.
- /z,x/ only occur as a result of words of Arabic origin.
- [ʔ] is not a phonemic sound, and is only heard before word-initial vowels.
- Sounds /p,ɥ,v/ only occur in word-initial position.
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.
Further reading
- Abdo, Alsadig Adam (November 2013). (PDF). Department of Linguistics. University of Khartoum. Archived from (PDF) on 5 March 2016.
- Edgar, John (January 1990). "Masalit stories". African Languages and Cultures. 3 (2). Taylor & Francis: 127–148. doi:. JSTOR .
- 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 .