The Maban languages are a small family of about 14 languages spoken in eastern Chad, the Central African Republic and western Sudan's Darfur region, including Maba, Masalit, Aiki and Kenjeje. They are tentatively placed within the hypothetical Nilo-Saharan family; a 2021 study by Roger Blench suggested their closest relatives may be the Eastern Sudanic Taman languages, based on shared tripartite number marking on nouns.
Facts
Partially Attested
Speaker CountA family-wide total is not published in one source. Maba (Bura Mabang), the largest of the roughly nine languages in this family, alone had this many speakers in Chad as of 2019 per the cited source, plus 28,000 more in Sudan as of 2022. Other member languages (Kenjeje, Masalit, Aiki, Karanga, Marfa, Runga, Kibet) are not counted here. RegionChad, Sudan, Central African Republic 1 Proto-Language StatusPartially reconstructed. Blench (2021) proposes a phonological reconstruction of Proto-Maban, including its consonant inventory and likely ATR vowel pairs. 1 Sources
1. Wikipedia: Maban Languages
Wikimedia FoundationMaban languages, Wikipedia, infobox region field
[[Chad]], [[Sudan]], [[Central African Republic]]
Maban languages, Wikipedia, Comparative vocabulary section
Blench (2021) posits the following consonants for proto-Maban:
View the Source 2. Wikipedia: Maba Language
Wikimedia FoundationMaba language, Wikipedia, opening paragraphQuote, Maba language, Wikipedia, opening paragraph
Most speakers of Maba reside in Chad with 542,000 speakers as of 2019.
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