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

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]

Phonology

Vowels

Consonants

• It has been stated that occasional click sounds [ǀ] and [ǃ] may occur, however; they are considered to be rare.
• Sounds /r, l, m, k/ can occur as geminated [rː, lː, mː, kː].
• Sounds /t, m, n, ŋ/ can occur as palatalized [tʲ, mʲ, nʲ, ŋʲ] before front vowels.
• /z, x/ only occur as a result of words of Arabic origin.
• [ʔ] is not a phonemic sound, and is only heard before word-initial vowels.
• Sounds /p, ɥ, v/ only occur in word-initial position.[3]

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

External links

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 University of Khartoum, Sadan: unpublished.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}}: 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.

На других языках

[fr] Masalit (langue)

[ru] Масалит