Masalit language

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]

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 University of Khartoum, Sadan: unpublished.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 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.