Masalit (autonym Masala/Masara; Arabic: ماساليت) is a Nilo-Saharan language of the Maban language group spoken by the Masalit people in West Darfur, Sudan and Ouaddaï Region, Chad.

Masalit, known as the Massalat, moved west into central-eastern Chad. Their ethnic population in Chad was 30,000 as of the 1993 census, but only 10 speakers of their language were reported in 1991.^[2]

Phonology

Vowels

Consonants

• It has been stated that occasional click sounds [ǀ] and [ǃ] may occur, however; they are considered to be rare.
• Sounds /r, l, m, k/ can occur as geminated [rː, lː, mː, kː].
• Sounds /t, m, n, ŋ/ can occur as palatalized [tʲ, mʲ, nʲ, ŋʲ] before front vowels.
• /z, x/ only occur as a result of words of Arabic origin.
• [ʔ] is not a phonemic sound, and is only heard before word-initial vowels.
• Sounds /p, ɥ, v/ only occur in word-initial position.^[3]

Sociolects

The Masalit language has two sociolects:

• "Heavy" Masalit, spoken by higher-ranking people and those in the countryside, with a complicated agglutinative grammar
• "Light" Masalit, spoken particularly in the home and in the market, with a somewhat simplified grammatical structure and many borrowings from Sudanese Arabic, the regional lingua franca and language of education.