Koalib (also called Kwalib, Abri, Lgalige, Nirere and Rere) is a Niger–Congo language in the Heiban family spoken in 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 Age ...

of southern Sudan.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

Writing system

It is written using the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic 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 Greece, Greek city of Cumae, in southe ...

, 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 normally read aloud as "at"; it is also commonly called the at symbol, commercial at, or address sign. It is used as an accounting and invoice abbreviation meaning "at a rate of" (e.g. 7 widgets @ £2 per widget = £14), but ...

(@) for transcribing the letter ع in

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walte ...

loanwords A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because the ...

. The

Unicode Standard Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

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. Its primary purpose is to maintain and publish the Unicode Standard which was developed with the intent ...

declined to encode the at sign separately as an orthographic letter.

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

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 Unicode Consortium. Three private use areas are defined: one in the Basic Multilingual Plane (), and one each in, and nearl ...

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 In several fields, especially computing, deprecation is the discouragement of use of some terminology, feature, design, or practice, typically because it has been superseded or is no longer considered efficient or safe, without completely removing ...

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