Heibanian Languages

The present paper deals with the lexical contribution of Arabic, the dominant
language of Sudan, to Koalib, a Kordofanian language traditionally spoken in the
northeastern part of the Nuba Mountains (Southern Kordofan, central Sudan).
The study is based on a corpus of 400 Koalib items borrowed from Arabic, the
main characteristics of which (social context, phonology, part of speech and semantics)
are successively examined and discussed. The conclusion summarizes
the main typological implications of the Arabic influence upon the Koalib grammatical
system.

Koalib is one of the aboriginal languages of the Nuba Mountains. It belongs to the Heiban branch of the Kordofanian family.
The Koalib ethnic group is made up of approximately 200,000 people (estimate for 2011), the majority of whom speak Koalib. However, a large proportion of the Koalib now no longer live in their homeland which was ravaged by fighting between the government and SPLA supporters during the second Sudanese civil war, which lasted from 1983 (Prunier 1989: 414-426) to 2002 in the South Kordofan area (when a local cease-fire was agreed between the SPLA and government troops). Indeed, during the war, tens of thousands of Koalib found refuge in Sudanese cities, particularly in Khartoum, where I began studying Koalib in 2000 during my first field-trip, before visiting Koalib-speaking villages in the Nuba Mountains from 2001 onwards. Since the formal signing of a peace agreement between the Khartoum government and the SPLA (on 9 January 2005), there has been a reverse flow of Koalib, who are now leaving the Sudanese cities and
relocating back in the Koalib homeland. However, the Koalib diaspora continues to represent a considerable proportion (probably over 50%) of individuals who consider themselves to be ethnically Koalib. All linguistic data presented in this article are derived from the Rere (ŋèrɛ́ɛɽɛ̀) dialect, spoken in the centre of the Koalib area (in the localities of Dere and Abri, see Quint 2009: 20-23, 2006b: 23-25). It has a written tradition dating back 80 years, linked to the arrival in 1923 of the first Protestant missionaries in Abri (Spartalis 1981: 58-59; Stevenson 1984: 72).

"Le Sud-Kordofan est une région montagneuse située au centre du Soudan et peuplée de 1,5 à 2 millions d ’ individus, en majorité des populations autochtones sédentaires, appelées collectivement Noubas. La diversité linguistique des monts Noubas (autre nom du Sud-Kordofan) est exceptionnelle, même au niveau africain :
sur une superficie de 80 000 km 2, on trouve au moins 50 langues vernaculaires (essentiellement parlées par les Noubas), plus l ’ arabe soudanais (principale langue véhiculaire de la région) et plusieurs autres idiomes d ’ origine ouest-africaine (haoussa, peul…). Les nombreuses langues vernaculaires utilisées par les Noubas appartiennent à deux grands phylums linguistiques : – le Nilo-saharien, auquel se rattachent la plupart des langues de l ’ Ouest des monts Nouba ; – le Niger-Congo, représenté exclusivement dans les monts Nouba par l' embranchement kordofanien, lequel compte au moins quatre familles, attestées essentiellement dans l’Est des monts Noubas.
Le koalib est une langue kordofanienne (de la famille heibanienne) parlée de nos jours par environ 100.000 personnes. L ’ aire d ’ origine du koalib se situe au Nord-Est des monts Nouba. Elle comprend notamment les localités d ’ Abri, Délami, El-Khadra, Umm Berembeita, Umm Heitan, ainsi que les massifs montagneux de Gnougour, d ’ Oumbri et de Turum.
Dans le présent article, je compte faire une première présentation de la littérature orale (en me limitant aux contes traditionnels 6 ) en koalib. Le développement qui suit se fonde sur les données que j ’ ai recueillies au cours de cinq missions de terrain effectuées au Soudan entre 2000 et 2008, à Khartoum et dans les monts Noubas."

Koalib, like many other languages of the world, has a word class comprising terms which qualify as ‘ideophones’, i.e. “marked words that depict sensory imagery” (Dingemanse 2012: 655, 2018: 3). After nouns and verbs, Koalib ideophones are the third most important lexical category in the language. Among the ca. 6,182 items (as of 27/11/2018) in our Koalib lexical database (Quint & Ali Karmal Koko, to appear), 583 are ideophones, i.e. 9% of the total number of entries, which seems to indicate that (in contrast with adjectives), ideophones constitute an open lexical category in Koalib. In this paper, we intend to discuss the main characteristics of Koalib ideophones. First, we will provide an initial characterization of Koalib ideophones and illustrate the main semantic types attested in the language. Second, we will detail the most salient phonological and iconic features of Koalib ideophones. Thirdly, we will give some information about the morpho-syntactic rules these ideophones follow. Fourthly, we will explore the semantic links existing between Koalib ideo-phones and the verbs whose meanings they modify or specify in various ways. Then, in a fifth section, we will make some brief comparative considerations, after which we will conclude this study, summarizing the main points dis-cussed herein.

In Koalib (Niger-Congo, Kordofanian branch, Heiban family), a basic verb can give rise to several verb extensions (VE), among which a benefactive and a malefactive. Section one deals with the main derivational characteristics (affixation, tonology, productivity, valency) of both VE. Section two proposes a more in-depth scrutiny of the morphology of those extensions in Koalib, examining various particular cases (lack of basic verb, double derivation, irregularities). Section three focuses on the semantics of Koalib bene-/malefactive VE, putting special emphasis on the semantic roles encoded by each extension, and on the diverse nuances of meaning they can convey. The conclusion lays the stress on the interest of Koalib (and more generally Kordofanian languages) data for typological studies of the notions of benefaction and malefaction in human language.

Koalib is one of the aboriginal languages of the Nuba Mountains. It belongs to the Heiban branch of the Kordofanian family. The Koalib ethnic group is made up of approximately 200,000 people (estimate for 2011), the majority of whom speak Koalib. However, a large proportion of the Koalib now no longer live in their homeland which was ravaged by fighting between the government and SPLA supporters during the second Sudanese civil war, which lasted from 1983 (Prunier 1989: 414-426) to 2002 in the South Kordofan area (when a local cease-fire was agreed between the SPLA and government troops). Indeed, during the war, tens of thousands of Koalib found refuge in Sudanese cities, particularly in Khartoum, where I began studying Koalib in 2000 during my first field-trip, before visiting Koalib-speaking villages in the Nuba Mountains from 2001 onwards. Since the formal signing of a peace agreement between the Khartoum government and the SPLA (on 9 January 2005), there has been a reverse flow of Koalib, who are now leaving the Sudanese cities and relocating back in the Koalib homeland. However, the Koalib diaspora continues to represent a considerable proportion (probably over 50%) of individuals who consider themselves to be ethnically Koalib. All linguistic data presented in this article are derived from the Rere (ŋèrɛ́ɛɽɛ̀) dialect, spoken in the centre of the Koalib area (in the localities of Dere and Abri, see Quint 2009: 20-23, 2006b: 23-25). It has a written tradition dating back 80 years, linked to the arrival in 1923 of the first Protestant missionaries in Abri (Spartalis 1981: 58-59; Stevenson 1984: 72).

The present paper deals with the lexical contribution of Arabic, the dominant language of Sudan, to Koalib, a Kordofanian language traditionally spoken in the northeastern part of the Nuba Mountains (Southern Kordofan, central Sudan). The study is based on a corpus of 400 Koalib items borrowed from Arabic, the main characteristics of which (social context, phonology, part of speech and semantics) are successively examined and discussed. The conclusion summarizes the main typological implications of the Arabic influence upon the Koalib grammatical system.

Today, the Kordofanian family of the Niger-Congo phylum remains one of the most poorly researched language families in Africa and worldwide. This book makes two descriptive grammars available to the scientific community, respectively Tira and Otoro (both of which belonging to the Heibanian branch of Kordofanian) and is therefore a most welcome publication.
The author of those grammars, Roland C. Stevenson (1915‒1991), is a member of the Church Missionary Society, who first arrived in Sudan in 1937 and soon got involved in the study of various Sudanese tongues. He devoted his PhD (Stevenson 1956-57) to the languages spoken in the Nuba Mountains, a region which is the home area of all attested Kordofanian languages. As “descriptive and comparative work on Kordofanian languages is still in its infancy”  (Schadeberg 1989: 79), Stevenson’s abundant linguistic production remains one of the main sources (and in some cases the only one) available for many Kordofanian languages.
The editor of these grammars, Thilo Schadeberg, is one of the very few linguists to have regularly worked and published on Kordofanian languages (e.g. Schadeberg 1981a/b, 1989) since the second half of the XXth century. As explained in the preface of the book, Stevenson wrote his Tira (TI) and Otoro (OT) grammars in 1942 and 1943 respectively. However, these existed only as typescripts and it is thanks to Schadeberg’s efforts that “the data and analyses” they contain are “presented here [i.e. in this book] for the first time in print” (p. viii).