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.[2] The Koalib Nuba, Turum and Umm Heitan ethnic groups speak this language.
Koalib | |
---|---|
Kowalib | |
Rere | |
Native to | Sudan |
Region | Nuba Hills |
Ethnicity | Koalib, Turum, Umm Heitan |
Native speakers | 100,000 (2009)[1] |
Niger–Congo?
| |
Latin | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | kib |
Glottolog | koal1240 |
Koalib dialects and locations (Ethnologue, 22nd edition):
Labial | Alveolar | Retroflex | Palatal | Velar | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
plain | lab. | ||||||
Plosive | voiceless | p | t | ʈ | c | k | kʷ |
voiced/imp. | b | d | ᶑ | ɟ | |||
prenasal | ᵐb | ⁿd | ᶯɖ | ᶮɟ | ᵑɡ | ᵑɡʷ | |
Fricative | f | ʃ | |||||
Nasal | m | n | ɲ | ŋ | ŋʷ | ||
Rhotic | r | ɽ | |||||
Approximant | l | j | w |
Front | Central | Back | |
---|---|---|---|
Close | i | u | |
Close-mid | e | o | |
Open-mid | ɛ | ɐ | ɔ |
Open | a |
It is written using the Latin script,[2] 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 in 2004 declined to encode the at sign separately as an orthographic letter due to lack of evidence of use.[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.[6]
The New Testament was published in Koalib in 1967.