Karko (also Garko, Kaak, Karme, Kithonirishe; autonym: ''Kakenbi'') is a Hill Nubian language spoken in the northwestern Nuba Mountains in the south of

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 ...

. It is spoken by around 7,000 people in the Karko hills, 35 km west of Dilling, including Dulman, although Jakobi Angelika & Hamdan Ahma estimate the Karko population at up to 15,000 individuals, mostly in urban centers. ''Ethnologue'' reports that speakers of Karko are shifting to

Sudanese Arabic Sudanese Arabic, also referred to as the Sudanese dialect (, ), Colloquial Sudanese ( ) or locally as Common Sudanese ( ) refers to the various related varieties of Arabic spoken in Sudan as well as parts of Egypt, Eritrea and Ethiopia. Sudanese ...

. The language is referred to in Karko as "Kàâŋg" or "káákmbἑἑ", which means "Karko ́s language". They also write that "Karko is part of Kordofan Nubian, a group of closely related languages which are also known as Hill Nubian" and descend from the Nubian language family.

Dialects

Karko has three dialects: Karko, Kasha and Shifir. Additionally, varieties spoken by the Ilaki on Abu Junuk to the west (by 1,000 people) and by the Tamang at El Tabaq southwest of Katla (by 800 people) may be dialects or separate languages.

Vowels

According to Angelika and Ahmad, the vowel system of Karko is “characterized by the distinction of eight vowel qualities. Except for the mid-central vowel /ǝ/ , which is attested as short vowel only, all other vowels appear both short and long."Jakobi Angelika & Hamdan Ahmad, p. 274

References

External links

Tabaq (Karko) DoReCo corpus
compiled by Birgit Hellwig, Gertrud Schneider-Blum and Khaleel Bakheet Khaleel Ismail. Audio recordings of narrative texts, with transcriptions time-aligned at the phone level and translations. Definitely endangered languages Nubian languages Languages of Sudan {{NiloSaharan-lang-stub