In the very center of the Republic of the Sudan, the province of South-Kordofan is home to several tens of diverse indigenous communities, each of which speaks (alongside with Arabic, the main vehicular of that region) a tongue of their own. The aim of this article is twofold :
- 1. to give a short introduction to the Kordofanian phylum, which regroups more than one half of the languages spoken today in the Nuba mountains.
- 2. to illustrate the most sailent features of Kordofanian languages through a selection of data taken from a case-study, namely Koalib, a Kordofanian language spoken in and around the cities of Delami, Umm Berembeita and Abri, in the Eastern Jebels of South Kordofan.