Masalit language

Masalit
kana masara
Native to	Sudan, Chad
Region	Dar Masalit (Darfur)
Ethnicity	Masalit people
Native speakers	410,000 (2006–2010)
Language family	Nilo-Saharan? Maban Masalit languages Masalit
Language codes
ISO 639-3	Either: mls – Masalit mdg – Massalat
Glottolog	nucl1440  Nuclear Masalit mass1262  Massalat

Masalit (autonym kana masara) is a Maban language spoken by the Masalit people in western Darfur. It has two sociolects: "heavy" Masalit, with a complicated agglutinative grammar, spoken by higher-ranking people and in the countryside, and "light", 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.

The Massalat moved west into Chad, and have almost entirely switched to Arabic. The ethnic population was 30,000 as of the 1993 census, but only 10 speakers were reported in 1991.

External links

• The Lost Languages, Found in New York - NYTimes.com

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 University of Khartoum, Sadan: unpublished.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 has empty unknown parameters: |1=, |2=, |3=, |4=, |5=, |6=, |7=, and |8= (help); Cite journal requires |journal= (help)CS1 maint: unrecognized language (link)
• 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.