| Koalib | |
| Nativename: | Rere |
| Also Known As: | Kowalib |
| Region: | Nuba Hills |
| States: | Sudan |
| Ethnicity: | Koalib, Turum, Umm Heitan |
| Speakers: | 100,000 |
| Date: | 2009 |
| Ref: | e25 |
| Script: | Latin alphabet |
| Familycolor: | Niger-Congo |
| Fam2: | Kordofanian (geographic) |
| Fam3: | Talodi–Heiban |
| Fam4: | Heiban |
| Fam5: | Central |
| Iso3: | kib |
| Glotto: | koal1240 |
| Glottorefname: | Koalib-Rere |
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.[1] The Koalib Nuba, Turum and Umm Heitan ethnic groups speak this language.
Koalib dialects and locations (Ethnologue, 22nd edition):
| Labial | Alveolar | Retroflex | Palatal | Velar | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | lab. | |||||||
| Plosive | voiceless | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |
| voiced/imp. | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||
| prenasal | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||
| Fricative | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| Nasal | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||
| Rhotic | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| Approximant | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||
| Front | Central | Back | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Close | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||
| Close-mid | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||
| Open-mid | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |
| Open | pronounced as /link/ |
It is written using the Latin script,[1] 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.[3]
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.[4] 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 and for that letter instead.[5]
The New Testament was published in Koalib in 1967.