The Rashad languages form a small
language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in hist ...
in the
Nuba Hills
The Nuba Mountains ( ar, جبال النوبة), also referred to as the Nuba Hills, is an area located in South Kordofan, Sudan. The area is home to a group of indigenous ethnic groups known collectively as the Nuba peoples. In the Middle Ages ...
of
Sudan
Sudan ( or ; ar, السودان, as-Sūdān, officially the Republic of the Sudan ( ar, جمهورية السودان, link=no, Jumhūriyyat as-Sūdān), is a country in Northeast Africa. It shares borders with the Central African Republic t ...
. They are named after
Rashad District
Rashad is a district of South Kordofan state, Sudan
Sudan ( or ; ar, السودان, as-Sūdān, officially the Republic of the Sudan ( ar, جمهورية السودان, link=no, Jumhūriyyat as-Sūdān), is a country in Northeast Africa. ...
of
South Kordofan
South Kordofan ( ar, جنوب كردفان ') is one of the 18 wilayat or states of Sudan. It has an area of 158,355 km² and an estimated population of approximately 1,100,000 people (2000).[Kordofanian
The Kordofanian languages are a geographic grouping of five language groups spoken in the Nuba Mountains of the Kurdufan, Sudan: Talodi–Heiban languages, Lafofa languages, Rashad languages, Katla languages and Kadu languages. The first four g ...]
proposal, they are of uncertain position within the
Niger–Congo family. It was at first thought that they shared the characteristic morphology of Niger–Congo, such as the noun-class system. However, only the Tagoi branch has noun classes, and Blench remarks that it appears to have been borrowed. Thus, he classifies Rashad as a divergent branch of Niger–Congo outside the
Atlantic–Congo core. A similar situation holds for another Kordofanian family,
Katla; these are not closely related to Rashad.
Unlike the neighbouring
Talodi-Heiban languages which have
SVO word order SVO may refer to:
* Saturn Valley Online, an EarthBound MMORPG
* Sheremetyevo International Airport, one three major airports serving Moscow, Russia, IATA Airport Code
* Social value orientations, a psychological construct
* Sparse voxel octree, an ...
, Rashad languages (and also
Lafofa) have
SOV word order SOV may refer to:
* SOV, Service Operations Vessel
* SOV, a former ticker symbol for Sovereign Bank
* SOV, a legal cryptocurrency created by the Sovereign Currency Act of 2018 of the Republic of the Marshall Islands
* SOV, the National Rail station ...
.
Languages
The number of Rashad languages varies among descriptions, from two (Williamson & Blench 2000, reflected in the ISO codes) to seven (Blench ''ms,'' shown here).
*
Tagoi
**Goy (Tagoi)
**Umali (Tumale)
**Moreb
**Orig (Turjuk)
*
Tegali
**Tegali (Tingal, Kajakja)
**Gom (Rashad)
See also
*
Rashad word lists (Wiktionary)
Further reading
*
Schadeberg, Thilo. 2013. Rashad survey data. In Roger Blench & Thilo Schadeberg (eds), ''Nuba Mountain Language Studies''. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe. pp. 325–345.
References
* Roger Blench. Unpublished
Kordofanian and Niger–Congo: new and revised lexical evidence
* Roger Blench, 2011
Should Kordofanian be split up? Nuba Hills Conference, Leiden
{{Niger-Congo branches
Kordofanian languages
Language families