Masalit language
| Masalit | |
|---|---|
| kana masara | |
| Native to | Sudan, Chad |
| Region | Dar Masalit (Darfur) |
| Ethnicity | Masalit people |
Native speakers | 410,000 (2006–2010)[1] |
|
Nilo-Saharan?
| |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 |
Either: mls – Masalit mdg – Massalat |
| Glottolog |
nucl1440 (Nuclear Masalit)[2]mass1262 (Massalat)[3] |
Masalit (autonym kana masara) is a Maban language spoken by the Masalit people in western Darfur. It has two sociolects: "heavy" Masalit, with a complicated agglutinative grammar, spoken by higher-ranking people and in the countryside, and "light", 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.
The Massalat moved west into Chad, and have almost entirely switched to Arabic.
References
- ↑ Masalit at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
Massalat at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) - ↑ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Nuclear Masalit". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
- ↑ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Massalat". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
Most develop will be Massalit language