Koalib language
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.[3] The Koalib Nuba, Turum and Umm Heitan ethnic groups speak this language.
Koalib | |
---|---|
Rere | |
Native to | Sudan |
Region | Nuba Hills |
Ethnicity | Koalib, Turum, Umm Heitan |
Native speakers | (44,000 cited 1984)[1] |
Niger–Congo
| |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | kib |
Glottolog | koal1240 [2] |
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
Writing system
It is written using the Latin script,[3] 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 declined to encode the at sign separately as an orthographic letter.[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.[4]
Publications
The New Testament was published in Koalib in 1967.
Footnotes
- Koalib at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
- Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Koalib-Rere". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
- Ethnologue report for language code: kib, retrieved on Apr. 12, 2010.
- Constable, Peter, and Lorna A. Priest (January 17, 2019) SIL Corporate PUA Assignments 5.2a. SIL International. pp. 59-60. Retrieved on July 20, 2020.
- Charis SIL font documentation, retrieved on Apr. 12, 2010.