Masalit language

Masalit
kana masara/masala
Native to Sudan, Chad
Region Dar Masalit (Darfur)
Ethnicity Masalit people
Native speakers
 410,000 (2006–2010)[1]
Nilo-Saharan?

  • Maban

    • Masalit languages
      • Masalit
Language codes
ISO 639-3 Either:
mls – Masalit
mdg – Massalat
Glottolog nucl1440  Nuclear Masalit[2]
mass1262  Massalat[3]

Masalit (autonym kana masara/masala) (Arabic: ماساليت‎‎) is a Maban language spoken by the Masalit people in western Darfur, Sudan.

The Masalit language has two sociolects: "heavy" Masalit, spoken by higher-ranking people and those in the countryside, with a complicated agglutinative grammar, 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.

A group of Masalit known as the Massalat moved west into central-eastern Chad and have almost entirely switched to Arabic. Their ethnic population in Chad was 30,000 as of the 1993 census, but only 10 speakers of their language were reported in 1991.[1]

References

  1. 1 2 Masalit at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    Massalat at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016). "Nuclear Masalit". Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  3. ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016). "Massalat". Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

Further reading


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