The Kuliak languages, also called the Rub languages,Ehret, Christopher (2001) ''A Historical-Comparative Reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan'' (SUGIA, Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika: Beihefte 12), Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, . or Nyangiyan languages are a group of languages spoken by small

relict A relict is a surviving remnant of a natural phenomenon. Biology A relict (or relic) is an organism that at an earlier time was abundant in a large area but now occurs at only one or a few small areas. Geology and geomorphology In geology, a r ...

communities in the mountainous Karamoja region of northeastern

Uganda Uganda, officially the Republic of Uganda, is a landlocked country in East Africa. It is bordered to the east by Kenya, to the north by South Sudan, to the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to the south-west by Rwanda, and to the ...

. Nyang'i and Soo are

moribund Moribund refers to a literal or figurative state near death. Moribund may refer to: * ''Moribund'' (album), a 2006 album by the Norwegian black metal band Koldbrann * " Le Moribond", a song by Jacques Brel known in English as "Seasons in the Sun ...

, with a handful of elderly speakers. However, Ik is vigorous and growing.

Word order In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how languages employ different orders. Correlatio ...

in Kuliak languages is verb-initial.Beer, Sam, Amber McKinney, Lokiru Kosma 2009. ''The So Language: A Grammar Sketch''. m.s.

Names

The Kuliak languages are also called the Rub languages by Ehret (1981), since Ehret reconstructed "Rub" to mean 'person' in Proto-Kuliak. He suggests that "Kuliak" may actually be a derogatory term used by neighboring Nilotic-speaking peoples to disparage Kuliak speakers as "poor," hence his preference for using Rub instead. However, Kuliak continues to be the most widely used name, and is preferred by

Roger Blench Roger Marsh Blench (born August 1, 1953) is a British linguist, ethnomusicologist and development anthropologist. He has an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and is based in Cambridge, England. He researches, publishes, and work ...

, Terrill Schrock, Sam Beer and other linguists, who note that the name "Kuliak" is not perceived as offensive or pejorative by any Kuliak speakers.

History

The Kuliak languages have previously had a much more extensive range in the past. Kuliak Loanwords in the

Luhya Luhya or Abaluyia may refer to: * Luhya people * Luhya language {{disambig Language and nationality disambiguation pages ...

, Gusii, Kalenjin and Sukuma languages show that these peoples inhabited western Kenya and the southern parts of

Lake Victoria Lake Victoria is one of the African Great Lakes. With a surface area of approximately , Lake Victoria is Africa's largest lake by area, the world's largest tropics, tropical lake, and the world's second-largest fresh water lake by surface are ...

before being absorbed by the ancestors of these Bantu and Nilotic speakers. These now extinct kuliak peoples are known as the "Southern Rub". The Southern Rub lived as far south as Lake Eyasi as shown by Kuliak loanwords in Hadza and Sandawe) and possibly as far east as the

Kilimanjaro Region Kilimanjaro Region (''Mkoa wa Kilimanjaro'' in Swahili language, Swahili) is one of Tanzania's 31 administrative Regions of Tanzania, regions. The regional capital and largest city is the municipality of Moshi, Tanzania, Moshi. With the 3rd highe ...

(as shown by Kuliak loanwords in the

Chaga The Chaga or Chagga () are a Bantu ethnic group from Kilimanjaro Region of Tanzania and Arusha Region of Tanzania. They are the third-largest ethnic group in Tanzania. They founded the now former sovereign Chagga states on the slopes of M ...

and Thagiicu languages).

Classification

Internal

According to the classification of Heine (1976), Soo and Nyang'i form a subgroup, Western Kuliak, while Ik stands by itself. According to Schrock (2015), " Dorobo" is a spurious language, is not a fourth Kuliak language, and may at ''most'' be a dialect of Ik. Heine finds the following numbers of correspondences between the languages on the 200-word

Swadesh list A Swadesh list () is a compilation of cultural universal, tentatively universal concepts for the purposes of lexicostatistics. That is, a Swadesh list is a list of forms and concepts which all languages, without exception, have terms for, such as ...

: * Soo – Nyang'i: 43.2% * Nyang'i – Ik: 26.7% * Soo – Ik: 24.2%

External

Bender (1989) had classified the Kuliak languages within the

Eastern Sudanic languages In most classifications, the Eastern Sudanic languages are a group of nine families of languages that may constitute a branch of the Nilo-Saharan languages, Nilo-Saharan language family. Eastern Sudanic languages are spoken from southern Egypt to ...

. Later, Bender (2000) revised this position by placing Kuliak as basal branch of

Nilo-Saharan The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of around 210 African languages spoken by somewhere around 70 million speakers, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributari ...

. ''

Glottolog ''Glottolog'' is an open-access online bibliographic database of the world's languages. In addition to listing linguistic materials ( grammars, articles, dictionaries) describing individual languages, the database also contains the most up-to-d ...

'' treats Kuliak as an independent language family and does not accept

as a valid language family. An early suggestion for Ik as a member of Afroasiatic was made by Archibald Tucker in the 1960s; this was criticized as weak and abandoned by the 1980s.

Evolution

The following sound correspondences are identified by

Bernd Heine Bernd Heine (born 25 May 1939) is a German linguist and specialist in African studies. From 1978 to 2004 Heine held the chair for African Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany, now being a Professor Emeritus. His main focal points in res ...

(1976),Heine, Bernd. 1976. ''The Kuliak Languages of Eastern Uganda''. Nairobi: East African Publishing House. who proposes also corresponding Proto-Kuliak reconstructions. For other vowel correspondences, Heine reconstructs clusters of vowels: * Front vowel + *o: yields Ik /ɔ/ or /o/, a front vowel in Tepes and Nyang'i. * Close vowel + *a or *ɔ: cluster retained in Nyang'i, contracted to a single vowel in the other languages. * *a, *i + *e, *i, *u: cluster retained in Ik, contracted to a single vowel in the other languages. * *ui: yields Ik /i/, Tepes /u/ or /wi/, Nyang'i /wi/. Heine reconstructs two classes of stress in Proto-Kuliak: "primary", which could occur in any position and remains in place in all Kuliak languages, and "secondary", which always occurred on the 2nd syllable of a word, and remains there in Ik and Nyang'i, but shifts to the first syllable in Tepes. BlenchBlench, Roger
Segment reversal in Kuliak and its relationship to Nilo-Saharan
notes that Kuliak languages do not have extensive internal diversity and clearly had a relatively recent common ancestor. There are many monosyllabic VC (vowel + consonant) lexical roots in Kuliak languages, which is typologically unusual among Nilo-Saharan languages and is more typical of some

Australian languages The Indigenous languages of Australia number in the hundreds, the precise number being quite uncertain, although there is a range of estimates from a minimum of around 250 (using the technical definition of 'language' as non-mutually intellig ...

such as Kunjen. Blench considers these VC roots to have cognates in other Nilo-Saharan languages, and suggests that the VC roots may have been eroded from earlier Nilo-Saharan roots that had initial consonants. Significant influences from

Cushitic languages The Cushitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken primarily in the Horn of Africa, with minorities speaking Cushitic languages to the north in Egypt and Sudan, and to the south in Kenya and Tanzania. As of ...

,Lamberti, Marcello. 1988. ''Kuliak and Cushitic: A Comparative Study''. (Studia linguarum africae orientalis, 3.) Heidelberg: Carl Winter. and more recently

Eastern Nilotic languages The Eastern Nilotic languages are one of the three primary branches of the Nilotic languages, themselves belonging to the Eastern Sudanic subfamily of Nilo-Saharan; they are believed to have begun to diverge about 3,000 years ago, and have spre ...

, are observable in the vocabulary and phonology of Kuliak languages. Blench notes that Kuliak appears to retain a core of non-Nilo-Saharan vocabulary, suggesting

language shift Language shift, also known as language transfer, language replacement or language assimilation, is the process whereby a speech community shifts to a different language, usually over an extended period of time. Often, languages that are perceived ...

from an indigenous language like that seen in Dahalo.

Numerals

Comparison of numerals in individual languages:

References

* Laughlin, C. D. (1975). "Lexicostatistics and the Mystery of So Ethnolinguistic Relations" in ''Anthropological Linguistics'' 17:325-41. * Fleming, Harold C. (1982). "Kuliak External Relations: Step One" in ''Nilotic Studies (Proceedings of the International Symposium on Languages and History of the Nilotic Peoples, Cologne, January 4–6, 1982'', Vol 2, 423–478. * Blench, Roger M. (2006). Archaeology, Language, and the African Past. Lanham: Altamira Press. {{Authority control Language families Languages of Uganda