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Wikipedia / Masalit language

Masalit (autonym Masala/Masara; ) 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 as of the 1993 census, but only 10 speakers of their language were reported in 1991.

Phonology

Vowels

Consonants

  • It has been stated that occasional click sounds and may occur, however; they are considered to be rare.

  • Sounds can occur as geminated .

  • Sounds /t, m, n, ŋ/ can occur as palatalized [tʲ, mʲ, nʲ, ŋʲ] before front vowels.

  • only occur as a result of words of Arabic origin.

  • is not a phonemic sound, and is only heard before word-initial vowels.

  • Sounds 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.

References

Further reading