Masalit language

Masalit (autonym Masala/Masara) (Arabic: ماساليت‎) is a 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
mass1262  Massalat

Masalit, known as the Massalat moved west into central-eastern Chad. Their ethnic population in Chad was 30,000 as of the 1993 census, but only 10 speakers of their language were reported in 1991.[2]

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. 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 University of Khartoum, Sadan: unpublished.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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