Kuliak languages

The Kuliak languages (sometimes called Rub) - Ik, Soo, and Nyang'i - are spoken by small relict communities in the mountains of northeastern Uganda. They form a branch of Nilo-Saharan, which Ehret (2001) places within the Eastern Sudanic branch but Bender (2000) maintains as an isolate within Nilo-Saharan. Significant influence from Cushitic languages, and more recently Nilotic languages, is observable in the vocabulary and phonology. Bernd Heine and Christopher Ehret have both proposed reconstructions of Proto-Kuliak. Soo and Nyang'i form a subgroup, Western Kuliak, against Ik. Blench notes that Kuliak appears to retain a core of non-Nilo-Saharan vocabulary, suggesting language shift from an indigenous language like that seen in Dahalo.

See also

• Ik

References

• Heine, Bernd (1976) The Kuliak Languages of Eastern Uganda. Nairobi: East African Publishing House.
• Ehret, Christopher (1981) "The classification of Kuliak", in ed. Thilo Schadeberg & Lionel Bender, Nilo-Saharan: Proceedings of the First Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium, Leiden, September 8-10, 1980. Dordrecht: Foris.
• Laughlin, C. D. (1975) "Lexicostatistics and the mystery of So ethnolinguistic relations" in Anthropological Linguistics 17:325-41.
• Fleming, Harold C. (1982) "Kuliak external relations: step one" in Nilotic Studes (Proceedings of the international symposium on languages and history of the Nilotic Peoples, Cologne, January 4-6, 1982, Vol 2, 423-478.