Native speakers (44,000 cited 1984) | Region Nuba Hills ISO 639-3 kib | |
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Ethnicity Koalib, Turum, Umm Heitan Language family Niger–CongoAtlantic–CongoTalodi–HeibanHeibanCentral HeibanKoalib | ||
Koalib (also called Kwalib, Abri, Lgalige, Nirere, and Rere) is a Niger–Congo language in the Heiban family spoken in the Sudan. The Koalib Nuba, Turum, and Umm Heitan ethnic groups speak this language.
It is written using the Latin script, but includes some unusual letters. It shares a tailed R (Ɽ) with other Sudanese languages, and uses a letter resembling the at sign (@) in writing Arabic loanwords. The Unicode Standard includes R WITH TAIL at code points U+027D (lowercase) and U+2C64 (uppercase), but the Unicode Consortium declined to encode the at sign separately as an orthographic letter. However, 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.