Koalib | |
---|---|
Rere | |
Spoken in | Sudan |
Region | Nuba Hills |
Ethnicity | Koalib, Turum, Umm Heitan |
Native speakers | 44,000 (1984) |
Language family |
Niger–Congo
|
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | kib |
Koalib (also called Kwalib, Abri, Lgalige, Nirere, and Rere) is a Niger–Congo language in the Heiban family spoken in the Sudan.[1] The Koalib Nuba, Turum, and Umm Heitan ethnic groups speak this language.
It is written using the Latin alphabet,[1] but includes some unusual characters. It shares a tailed R (Ɽ) with other Sudanese languages, and uses a letter resembling the at sign (@) in writing Arabic loanwords. The Unicode Standard includes R WITH TAIL at code points U+027D (lowercase) and U+2C64 (uppercase), but the Unicode Consortium declined to encode the at sign separately as an orthographic letter.[2] However, SIL International maintains a registry of Private Use Area code points in which U+F247 represents LATIN SMALL LETTER AT, and U+F248 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER AT.[3]