Masalit language

Masalit
kana masara
Spoken in	Sudan, Chad
Region	Dar Masalit (Darfur)
Ethnicity	Masalit people
Native speakers	240,000
Language family	Nilo-Saharan? Maban Masalit languages Masalit
Language codes
ISO 639-3	either: mls – Masalit mdg – Malalat

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.

Bibliography

• Edgar, John. A Masalit grammar: with notes on other languages of Darfur and Wadai. Berlin: D. Reimer, 1989. (Sprache und Oralitat in Afrika; 3).
• Ethnologue report

External links

• Map of Masalit language from the LL-Map project
• Information on Masalit language from the MultiTree project
• The Lost Languages, Found in New York - NYTimes.com