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, probably within the Eastern Sudanic branch, although their exact place within the family is disputed. 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, as against Ik. It has been suggested that Kuliak elements may be observable in Oropom, if it exists.
See also
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.
