Native to Sudan, Chad Ethnicity Masalit people | Region Dar Masalit (Darfur) Native speakers 410,000 (2006–2010) | |
Language family Nilo-Saharan?
Maban
Masalit languages
Masalit ISO 639-3 Either:
mls – Masalit
mdg – Massalat | ||
Masalit (autonym kana masara/masala) (Arabic: ماساليت ) is a Maban language spoken by the Masalit people in western Darfur.
The Masalit language 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.
References
Masalit language Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA