Sudanese

How to spell sudanese

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce sudanese

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sudanese mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to Sudan, its people, or its culture.
2. nounA person from Sudan, or the people of Sudan collectively.

Sudanese in a sentence

• adjective

  The museum displayed several sudanese textiles from the Nile region.

• noun

  Many sudanese have settled in the city over the past decade.

• adjective

  The restaurant served a traditional sudanese stew made with peanuts.

• noun

  The conference brought together sudanese from across the diaspora.

Where does sudanese come from?

Language of origin: Arabic

This word is built on the place name Sudan, which comes from the Arabic phrase bilad as-sudan, literally 'the land of the black peoples', where sudan is the plural of aswad, the Arabic word for 'black'. Medieval Arab geographers used the term for the broad band of African territory south of the Sahara, and it eventually narrowed to the modern country. To this name English attached the suffix -ese, a productive ending that comes through Old French and Italian from the Latin -ensis, meaning 'belonging to' or 'originating from', the same element seen in Chinese, Portuguese, and Maltese. The suffix has been used since at least the seventeenth century to coin demonyms for distant nations. The spelling trap is purely in the ending: writers reach for -eese or -ease, when the standard form keeps a single e before the soft -se.

How the word is built

• Sudan (the country, from Arabic bilad as-sudan 'land of the black peoples')
• -ese (suffix forming demonyms and adjectives of origin)