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.^[2] 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 [ᶑ] rather than a standard plosive [ɖ].
• 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 [v, ð, ʒ, ɡ, ɡʷ]. In post-consonantal position, /f, t, ʃ, k/ are heard as [v, ð, ʒ, ɡ].
• In final position, sounds /ɟ, f/ are heard as [c, p].
• Sounds /p, t, ʈ, c, k, kʷ/ in intervocalic position can be heard as tense [pː, tː, ʈː, cː, kː, kːʷ].^[3]

Vowels

Writing system

It is written using the Latin script,^[2] but includes some unusual letters. It shares a tailed R (Ɽ) with other Sudanese languages, and uses a letter resembling the at sign (@) for transcribing the letter ع in Arabic loanwords. The Unicode Standard includes R WITH TAIL at code points U+027D (lowercase) and U+2C64 (uppercase), but the Unicode Consortium in 2004 declined to encode the at sign separately as an orthographic letter due to lack of evidence of use.^[4]

SIL International maintains a registry of Private Use Area code points in which U+F247 represents LATIN SMALL LETTER AT, and U+F248 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER AT.^[5] However, they have marked this PUA representation as deprecated since September 2014, and the current version of their corporate PUA character assignments package recommends using U+24D0 ⓐ CIRCLED LATIN SMALL LETTER A and U+24B6 Ⓐ CIRCLED LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A for that letter instead.^[6]

Publications

The New Testament was published in Koalib in 1967.