Kordofanian

An insatiable appetite for ancient and modern tongues

Overview and Distribution. The Kordofanian family consists of some 20 languages spoken by no more than half a million people in a small area of central Sudan, in the Nuba Hills located in the province of South Kordofan, southwest of the capital Khartoum. They are geographically separated from Niger-Congo and surrounded by Nilo-Saharan languages. Until today, they remain little studied.

External Classification: Kordofanian languages are generally classified as one of the families of the Niger-Congo phylum, though this remains controversial. If they do belong to Niger-Congo, they must have separated from Proto-Niger-Congo earlier than all of the other families.

Internal Classification and Speakers: Kordofanian is divided into four main groups, centered around the towns of Heiban, Talodi, Rashad and Katla. There are perhaps close to half a million Kordofanian speakers. The numbers for each individual language are not very reliable.

a) Heiban
Koalib (Rere)
Tiro
Laro (Laru)
Moro
Utoro (Otoro)
Ebang (Heiban)
Shirumba
Ko
Logol
Warnang

70,000
70,000
50,000
50,000
12,000
7,000
5,000
4,000
3,000
2,500

b) Talodi
Ngile/Dengebu
Tocho
Jomang (Talodi)
Tegem (Lafofa)
Nding (Eliri)

60,000
6,000
2,000
700
extinct

c) Rashad
Tegali
Tagoy (Tagoi)

50,000
20,000

d) Katla
Kalak (Katla)
Lomorik (Tima)

20,000
?

Oldest Documents

1829. A list of Shirumba and Tegali words, recorded by E. Rüppell.

1848-50. The first analysis of a Kordofanian language (Tumale, a dialect of Tagoi), published by Lorenz Tutschek.

1880. Richard Lepsius realized that the languages of the Nubian Hills constituted a distinctive group.

SHARED FEATURES

✦ Phonology
-Stops have usually five places of articulation: labial, dental, alveolar or retroflex, palatal and velar. The contrast between voiced and voiceless stops is relatively unimportant to distinguish different words. Stops are usually voiceless if they are part of a sequence of stops or are at the end of a word; they are voiced between vowels, nasals and liquids.

-Among the voiceless fricatives, alveolar s is the only widely distributed, being found across the four Kordofanian groups. Another voiceless fricative, f, occurs in the Rashad group and in Heiban language.

-Nasals are usually articulated at four points: labial, alveolar, palatal and velar.

✦ Morphology
-Noun class systems, marked by prefixes, are found in at least three branches of Kordofanian (Heiban, Talodi, Rashad). They are similar to those found in Bantu and other Niger-Congo languages. Adjectives, determiners and even verbs are marked by the same prefix as the head-noun.

✦ Syntax
-There seems to be a lot of variation in word order among Kordofanian languages. Some, like Heiban, are Subject-Verb-Object (SVO); others are SOV and one is VSO.