Tegali (also spelled ''Tagale, Tegele, Tekele, Togole'') is a

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 ...

language in the

Rashad Rashad is a given name which may refer to: Surname: *Ahmad Rashad (born 1949), American football player and sportcaster *Ali Akbar Rashad (born 1955), Iranian philosopher and Islamic scholar *Isaiah Rashad (born 1991), American rapper *Phylicia Ras ...

family, which is thought by some to belong to the hypothetical Niger–Congo phylum (Greenberg 1963, Schadeberg 1981, Williamson & Blench 2000). It is spoken in

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).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 ...

Classification

The Rashad family of language consists of two dialect clusters, Tegali and Tagoi, which share about 70% basic vocabulary on the 100-word

Swadesh list The Swadesh list ("Swadesh" is pronounced ) is a classic compilation of tentatively universal concepts for the purposes of lexicostatistics. Translations of the Swadesh list into a set of languages allow researchers to quantify the interrelatedness ...

. They are spoken on two mountain ranges to the north and north-west of Rashad. These languages are spoken in the Tegali Hills in the north-east of the

Nuba Mountains 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, ...

, the home of the former "Tegali Kingdom". The most conspicuous difference between the two dialect clusters is that Tagoi has a complex system of

noun class In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some ...

es while Tegali does not. Different explanations exist for why Tegali dialects lack of noun class system.

Greenberg Greenberg is a surname common in North America, with anglicized spelling of the German Grünberg (''green mountain'') or the Jewish Ashkenazi Yiddish Grinberg, an artificial surname.Beider, Alexander (1993). ''A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from ...

(1963) excludes the possibility of mass borrowing of basic vocabulary in Tagoi and assumes the loss of noun classes in the Tegali dialects.

Dialects/varieties

Tegali has three varieties, Rashad (Gom, Kom, Kome, Ngakom), Tegali, and Tingal (Kajaja, Kajakja). ''Ethnologue'' states that Rashed and Tegali dialects are nearly identical. Tucker and Bryan list Rashad as almost identical to Tegali, "perhaps a mere variation of one language"; however, Greenberg lists it as a separate language. Welmers suggests Tingal as a dialect of Tegali; Tucker and Bryan report this as different from Tegali and Rashad, but as definitely belonging to the Tegali branch.

Geographic distribution

There are 35,700 native speakers of Tegali in

. Speakers are distributed in the hills between the Rashud-Rashad and Rashad-Umm Ruwaba roads, with a few outlying hills west of Rashad (including Tagoi and Tarjok) and scattered hills south of Rashad.

Dialects/varieties distribution

Among the three dialects, Tegali has about 16,000 speakers located on the Tegali range. Rashad has about 5,000 speakers in the Rashad hills in the southern part of the Tegali range, also in Rashad town. Tingal (Kajakja) has about 2,100 speakers.

Examples

Numeral system

Tegali has a counting system similar to that of Tagoi. But now they seemed have developed a more complete numeral system. There is an option for the number 20 'fəŋəndən rəkkʊ'.

References

External links

Tegali at the Endangered Languages Project
* Simons, Gary F. and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). 2017.
Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Twentieth edition.
' Dallas, Texas: SIL International. * Hammarström, Harald & Forkel, Robert & Haspelmath, Martin. 2017.
Glottolog 3.0.
' Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. * Tegali at the

' {{Kordofanian languages Rashad languages