Koalib language
Niger–Congo language of Sudan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Koalib (also called Kwalib, Abri, Lgalige, Nirere and Rere) is a Niger–Congo language in the Heiban family spoken in the Nuba Mountains of southern Sudan.[2] The Koalib Nuba, Turum and Umm Heitan ethnic groups speak this language.
| Koalib | |
|---|---|
| Kowalib | |
| Rere | |
| Native to | Sudan |
| Region | Nuba Hills |
| Ethnicity | Koalib, Turum, Umm Heitan |
Native speakers | 100,000 (2009)[1] |
Niger–Congo?
| |
| Latin | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | kib |
| Glottolog | koal1240 |
Dialects and locations
Koalib dialects and locations (Ethnologue, 22nd edition):
- Nginyukwur dialect: Hadra, Nyukwur, and Umm Heitan
- Ngirere dialect: Abri area
- Ngunduna dialect: Koalib hills area
- Nguqwurang dialect: Turum and Umm Berumbita
Phonology
Consonants
- The voiced retroflex equivalent is an implosive sound [ᶑ] rather than a standard plosive [ɖ].
- Gemination occurs among plosive, nasal, liquid and approximant sounds.
- Sounds /f, t, ʃ, k, kʷ/ in intervocalic or pre-consonantal position can be heard as voiced [v, ð, ʒ, ɡ, ɡʷ]. In post-consonantal position, /f, t, ʃ, k/ are heard as [v, ð, ʒ, ɡ].
- In final position, sounds /ɟ, f/ are heard as [c, p].
- Sounds /p, t, ʈ, c, k, kʷ/ in intervocalic position can be heard as tense [pː, tː, ʈː, cː, kː, kːʷ].[3]
Vowels
Writing system
It is written using the Latin script,[2] but includes some unusual letters. It shares a tailed R (Ɽ) with other Sudanese languages, and uses a letter resembling the at sign (@) for transcribing the letter ع in Arabic loanwords. The Unicode Standard includes R WITH TAIL at code points U+027D (lowercase) and U+2C64 (uppercase), but the Unicode Consortium in 2004 declined to encode the at sign separately as an orthographic letter due to lack of evidence of use.[4]
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.[5] However, they have marked this PUA representation as deprecated since September 2014, and the current version of their corporate PUA character assignments package recommends using U+24D0 ⓐ CIRCLED LATIN SMALL LETTER A and U+24B6 Ⓐ CIRCLED LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A for that letter instead.[6]
Publications
The New Testament was published in Koalib in 1967.[citation needed]
