Masalit language

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

Masalit
kana masalaka/masaraka
Native toSudan, Chad
RegionWest Darfur, South Darfur (Sudan), Ouaddaï Region (Chad)
EthnicityMasalit
Native speakers
440,000 (2011-2013)[1]
Nilo-Saharan?
  • Maban
    • Masalit languages
      • Masalit
Language codes
ISO 639-3Either:
mls – Masalit
mdg – Massalat
Glottolognucl1440  Nuclear Masalit[2]
mass1262  Massalat[3]

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.[4]

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
  1. "Masalit". Ethnologue. Retrieved 2018-09-14.
  2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Masalit". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  3. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Massalat". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  4. Masalit language at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)

Further reading
  • Abdo, Alsadig Adam (2013). "Contrastive Analysis Between Masalit and English Language" (PDF). (in Masalit and English). University of Khartoum, Sadan: unpublished. Retrieved 8 May 2015. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  • Edgar, J. (1990). Masalit stories. African Languages and Cultures, 3(2), 127-148.
  • Jakobi, A. (1991). Au Masali Grammar: With Notes on Other Languages of Darfur and Wadai. Anthropos, 86(4-6), 599-601.


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