Koalib is a Niger–Congo language in the Heiban family spoken in the Sudan

Sudan

Sudan , officially the Republic of the Sudan , is a country in North Africa, sometimes considered part of the Middle East politically. It is bordered by Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the northeast, Eritrea and Ethiopia to the east, South Sudan to the south, the Central African Republic to the...

. The Koalib Nuba

Koalib Nuba

Koalib Nuba is an ethnic minority of Sudan and a subgroup of the people called "Nuba". It numbers more than 50,000 persons. This minority is divided in terms of religion. They speak Koalib, a Niger–Congo language. They live in the Nuba Mountains in Kordofan....

, Turum

Turum

Turum is an ethnic group in South Kurdufan in Sudan. They speak Koalib, a Niger-Congo. The population of this group likely is below 5,000....

, and Umm Heitan

Umm Heitan

Umm Heitan is an ethnic group in South Kurdufan in Sudan. They speak Koalib, a Niger-Congo language. The population of this group likely is 22,000. They are a Muslim ethnic grouping.- External links :...

 ethnic groups speak this language.

It is written using the Latin alphabet

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...

, but includes some unusual characters. It shares a tailed R (Ɽ) with other Sudanese languages, and uses a letter resembling the at sign

At sign

The at sign , also called the ampersat, apetail, arroba, atmark, at symbol, commercial at or monkey tail, is formally an abbreviation of the accounting and commercial invoice term "at the rate of"...

 (@) in writing Arabic

Arabic language

Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...

 loanwords. The Unicode Standard includes R WITH TAIL at code points U+027D (lowercase) and U+2C64 (uppercase), but the Unicode Consortium

Unicode Consortium

The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization that coordinates the development of the Unicode standard. Its stated goal is to eventually replace existing character encoding schemes with Unicode and its standard Unicode Transformation Format schemes, claiming that many of the existing...

 declined to encode the at sign separately as an orthographic letter. However, SIL International

SIL International

SIL International is a U.S.-based, worldwide, Christian non-profit organization, whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to expand linguistic knowledge, promote literacy, translate the Christian Bible into local languages,...

 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.