Koalib (also called Kwalib, Abri, Lgalige, Nirere and Rere) is a Niger–Congo language in the Heiban family spoken in the Nuba Mountains of southern

Sudan Sudan, officially the Republic of the Sudan, is a country in Northeast Africa. It borders the Central African Republic to the southwest, Chad to the west, Libya to the northwest, Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the east, Eritrea and Ethiopi ...

.Ethnologue report
for language code: kib, retrieved on Apr. 12, 2010. The Koalib Nuba, Turum and Umm Heitan ethnic groups speak this language.

Dialects and locations

Koalib dialects and locations (''Ethnologue'', 22nd edition): *''Nginyukwur'' dialect: Hadra, Nyukwur, and Umm Heitan *''Ngirere'' dialect: Abri area *''Ngunduna'' dialect: Koalib hills area *''Nguqwurang'' dialect: Turum and Umm Berumbita

Phonology

Consonants

* The voiced retroflex equivalent is an implosive sound ��rather than a standard plosive � * Gemination occurs among plosive, nasal, liquid and approximant sounds. * Sounds /f, t, ʃ, k, kʷ/ in intervocalic or pre-consonantal position can be heard as voiced , ð, ʒ, ɡ, ɡʷ In post-consonantal position, /f, t, ʃ, k/ are heard as , ð, ʒ, ɡ * In final position, sounds /ɟ, f/ are heard as

, p The comma is a punctuation mark that appears in several variants in different languages. Some typefaces render it as a small line, slightly curved or straight, but inclined from the vertical; others give it the appearance of a miniature fille ...

* Sounds /p, t, ʈ, c, k, kʷ/ in intervocalic position can be heard as tense ː, tː, ʈː, cː, kː, kːʷ

Vowels

Writing system

It is written using the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

, but includes some unusual letters. It shares a tailed R (Ɽ) with other Sudanese languages, and uses a letter resembling the

at sign The at sign () is an accounting and invoice abbreviation meaning "at a rate of" (e.g. 7 Widget (economics), widgets @ £2 per widget = £14), now seen more widely in email addresses and social media platform User (computing), handles. It is norm ...

(@) for transcribing the letter ع in

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

loanwords A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term t ...

. The

Unicode Standard Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 cha ...

includes R WITH TAIL at code points U+027D (lowercase) and U+2C64 (uppercase), but the

Unicode Consortium The Unicode Consortium (legally Unicode, Inc.) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization incorporated and based in Mountain View, California, U.S. Its primary purpose is to maintain and publish the Unicode Standard which was developed with the in ...

in 2004 declined to encode the at sign separately as an orthographic letter due to lack of evidence of use.

SIL International SIL Global (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics International) is an evangelical Christian nonprofit organization whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, to expan ...

maintains a registry of

Private Use Area In Unicode, a Private Use Area (PUA) is a range of code points that, by definition, will not be assigned characters by the standard. Three Private Use Areas are defined: one in the Basic Multilingual Plane (), and one each in, and nearly covering ...

code points in which U+F247 represents LATIN SMALL LETTER AT, and U+F248 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER AT.Charis SIL
font documentation, retrieved on Apr. 12, 2010. However, they have marked this PUA representation as

deprecated Deprecation is the discouragement of use of something human-made, such as a term, feature, design, or practice. Typically something is deprecated because it is claimed to be inferior compared to other options available. Something may be deprec ...

since September 2014, and the current version of their corporate PUA character assignments package recommends using and for that letter instead.Constable, Peter, and Lorna A. Priest (January 17, 2019
''SIL Corporate PUA Assignments 5.2a''

SIL International
. pp. 59-60. Retrieved on July 20, 2020.

Publications

The New Testament was published in Koalib in 1967.

Footnotes

External links

Rere Koalib basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
Heiban languages {{Kordofanian-lang-stub