The Nubian languages ( ar, لُغَات نُوبِيّة, lughāt nūbiyyah) are a group of related languages spoken by the

Nubians Nubians () ( Nobiin: ''Nobī,'' ) are an ethnic group indigenous to the region which is now northern Sudan and southern Egypt. They originate from the early inhabitants of the central Nile valley, believed to be one of the earliest cradles of ...

. They form a branch of the

Eastern Sudanic languages In most classifications, the Eastern Sudanic languages are a group of nine families of languages that may constitute a branch of the Nilo-Saharan language family. Eastern Sudanic languages are spoken from southern Egypt to northern Tanzania. Nu ...

, which is part of the wider Nilo-Saharan phylum. Initially, Nubian languages were spoken throughout much of

Sudan Sudan ( or ; ar, السودان, as-Sūdān, officially the Republic of the Sudan ( ar, جمهورية السودان, link=no, Jumhūriyyat as-Sūdān), is a country in Northeast Africa. It shares borders with the Central African Republic t ...

, but as a result of

Arabization Arabization or Arabisation ( ar, تعريب, ') describes both the process of growing Arab influence on non-Arab populations, causing a language shift by the latter's gradual adoption of the Arabic language and incorporation of Arab culture, aft ...

they are today mostly limited to the

Nile Valley The Nile, , Bohairic , lg, Kiira , Nobiin: Áman Dawū is a major north-flowing river in northeastern Africa. It flows into the Mediterranean Sea. The Nile is the longest river in Africa and has historically been considered the longest riv ...

between

Aswan Aswan (, also ; ar, أسوان, ʾAswān ; cop, Ⲥⲟⲩⲁⲛ ) is a city in Southern Egypt, and is the capital of the Aswan Governorate. Aswan is a busy market and tourist centre located just north of the Aswan Dam on the east bank of the ...

(southern

Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning the North Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via a land bridg ...

) and Al Dabbah. Nubian is not to be confused with the various Nuba languages spoken in villages in the Nuba mountains and

Darfur Darfur ( ; ar, دار فور, Dār Fūr, lit=Realm of the Fur) is a region of western Sudan. ''Dār'' is an Arabic word meaning "home f – the region was named Dardaju ( ar, دار داجو, Dār Dājū, links=no) while ruled by the Daju ...

History

In the

October War The Yom Kippur War, also known as the Ramadan War, the October War, the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, or the Fourth Arab–Israeli War, was an armed conflict fought from October 6 to 25, 1973 between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egy ...

, Egypt employed Nubian-speaking Nubian people as

code talker A code talker was a person employed by the military during wartime to use a little-known language as a means of secret communication. The term is now usually associated with United States service members during the world wars who used their k ...

Languages

Rilly (2010) distinguishes the following Nubian languages, spoken by in total about 900,000 speakers: # Nobiin, the largest Nubian language with 545,000 speakers in

, and the Nubian diaspora. Previously known by the geographic terms Mahas and Fadicca/Fiadicca. As late as 1863 this language, or a closely related dialect, was known to have been spoken by the

arabized Arabization or Arabisation ( ar, تعريب, ') describes both the process of growing Arab influence on non-Arab populations, causing a language shift by the latter's gradual adoption of the Arabic language and incorporation of Arab culture, ...

Nubian

Shaigiya tribe The Shaigiya, Shaiqiya, Shawayga or Shaykia () are an Arab or Arabised Nubian tribe. They are part of the Sudanese Arabs and are also one of the three prominent Sudanese Arabs tribes in North Sudan, along with the Ja'alin and Danagla. The tribe ...

. # Kenzi (

endonym An endonym (from Greek: , 'inner' + , 'name'; also known as autonym) is a common, ''native'' name for a geographical place, group of people, individual person, language or dialect, meaning that it is used inside that particular place, group, ...

: Mattokki) with 100,000 speakers in

and Dongolawi (

: Andaandi) with 180,000 speakers in

. They are no longer considered a single language, but closely related. The split between Kenzi and Dongolawi is dated relatively recently to the 14th century. # Midob (Meidob) with 30,000 speakers. The language is spoken primarily in and around the Malha volcanic crater in North

. # Birgid, now extinct, was spoken north of

Nyala The lowland nyala or simply nyala (''Tragelaphus angasii'') is a spiral-horned antelope native to southern Africa. It is a species of the family Bovidae and genus ''Tragelaphus'', previously placed in genus ''Nyala''. It was first described in ...

around Menawashei, with the last known speakers alive in the 1970s. It was the predominant language between the corridor of Nyala and

al-Fashir Al Fashir, Al-Fashir or El Fasher ( ar, الفاشر) is the capital city of North Darfur, Sudan. It is a large town in the Darfur region of northwestern Sudan, northeast of Nyala, Sudan. "Al-Fashir" (description) '' Encyclopædia Brita ...

in the north and the

Bahr al-Arab Bahr al-Arab ( ar, بحر العرب; also called the Kiir River) is a river which flows approximately through the southwest of Sudan and marks part of its international border with South Sudan. It is part of the Nile river system, being a ...

in the south as recently as 1860. # Hill Nubian or Kordofan Nubian, a group of closely related languages or dialects spoken in various villages in the northern Nuba Mountains; in particular by the Dilling, Debri, and Kadaru. An extinct language, Haraza, is known only from a few dozen words recalled by village elders in 1923.

Old Nubian Old Nubian (also called Middle Nubian or Old Nobiin) is an extinct Nubian language, attested in writing from the 8th to the 15th century AD. It is ancestral to modern-day Nobiin and closely related to Dongolawi and Kenzi. It was used throughou ...

is preserved in at least a hundred pages of documents, comprising both texts of a

Christian Christians () are people who follow or adhere to Christianity, a monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. The words ''Christ'' and ''Christian'' derive from the Koine Greek title ''Christós'' (Χρι� ...

religious nature and documentary texts dealing with state and legal affairs. Old Nubian was written with a slanted

uncial Uncial is a majuscule Glaister, Geoffrey Ashall. (1996) ''Encyclopedia of the Book''. 2nd edn. New Castle, DE, and London: Oak Knoll Press & The British Library, p. 494. script (written entirely in capital letters) commonly used from the 4th to ...

variety of the

Coptic alphabet The Coptic alphabet is the script used for writing the Coptic language. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the Greek alphabet augmented by letters borrowed from the Egyptian Demotic and is the first alphabetic script used for the Egyptian ...

, with the addition of characters derived from Meroitic. These documents range in date from the 8th to the 15th century AD. Old Nubian is currently considered ancestral to modern Nobiin, even though it shows signs of extensive contact with Dongolawi. Another, as yet undeciphered Nubian language has been preserved in a few inscriptions found in

Soba Soba ( or , "buckwheat") is a thin Japanese noodle made from buckwheat. The noodles are served either chilled with a dipping sauce, or hot in a noodle soup. The variety ''Nagano soba'' includes wheat flour. In Japan, soba noodles can be found ...

, the capital of

Alodia Alodia, also known as Alwa ( grc-gre, Aρουα, ''Aroua''; ar, علوة, ''ʿAlwa''), was a medieval kingdom in what is now central and southern Sudan. Its capital was the city of Soba, located near modern-day Khartoum at the confluence of t ...

. Since their publication by Adolf Ermann in 1881, they are referred as 'Alwan inscriptions' or 'Alwan Nubian.' Synchronic research on the Nubian languages began in the last decades of the nineteenth century, first focusing on the Nile Nubian languages Nobiin and Kenzi-Dongolawi. Several well-known Africanists have occupied themselves with Nubian, most notably

Lepsius Lepsius is a German surname. Notable people with the surname include: *Johannes Lepsius (1858–1926), German humanitarian *Karl Richard Lepsius, Prussian Egyptologist *Reinhold Lepsius (1857–1922), German painter *Sabine Lepsius Sabine Lepsi ...

(1880), Reinisch (1879) and Meinhof (1918); other early Nubian scholars include Almkvist and

Schäfer Schaefer is an alternative spelling and cognate for the German word ''schäfer'', meaning 'shepherd', which itself descends from the Old High German '' scāphare''. Variants "Shaefer", "Schäfer" (a standardized spelling in many German-speakin ...

. Additionally, important

comparative general linguistics, the comparative is a syntactic construction that serves to express a comparison between two (or more) entities or groups of entities in quality or degree - see also comparison (grammar) for an overview of comparison, as well ...

work on the Nubian languages has been carried out by Thelwall, Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst in the second half of the twentieth century and Claude Rilly and George Starostin in the twenty-first.

Classification

Traditionally, the Nubian languages are divided into three branches: Northern (Nile), Western (Darfur), and Central. ''Ethnologue's'' classifies the Nubian languages as follows:. * Northern (Nile) **

*** Nobiin * Western (Darfur) ** Midob * Central ** Kenzi ** Birgid ** Dongolawi ** Hill (Kordofan) *** Kadaru-Ghulfan **** Ghulfan **** Kadaru *** Unclassified **** Dair **** Dilling **** El Hugeirat **** Karko ****

Wali A wali (''wali'' ar, وَلِيّ, '; plural , '), the Arabic word which has been variously translated "master", "authority", "custodian", "protector", is most commonly used by Muslims to indicate an Islamic saint, otherwise referred to by the ...

Glottolog ''Glottolog'' is a bibliographic database of the world's lesser-known languages, developed and maintained first at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (between 2015 and 2020 at the Max Planck Institute f ...

groups all non-Northern Nubian branches in a single group named West-Central Nubian. Additionally, within Hill Nubian, Glottolog places Dair in the same branch as Kadaru. The relation between Dongolawi and Nobiin remains a matter of debate within Nubian Studies. Ethnologue's classification is based on glotto-chronological research of Thelwall (1982) and Bechhaus-Gerst (1996), which considers Nobiin the earliest branching from Proto-Nubian. They attribute the current syntactical and phonological proximity between Nobiin and Dongolawi to extensive language contact. Arguing that there is no archeological evidence for a separate migration to the Nile of Dongolawi speakers, Rilly (2010) provides evidence that the difference in vocabulary between Nobiin and Dongolawi is mainly due to a pre-Nubian substrate underneath Nobiin, which he relates to the Meroitic. Approaching the inherited proto-Nubian vocabulary in all Nubian languages systematically through a comparative linguistic approach, Rilly arrives at the following classification: * Nile Nubian **

*** Nobiin ** Kenzi-Dongolawi *** Dongolawi *** Kenzi * Western Nubian ** Birgid ** Midob-Kordofan *** Midob ***

Kordofan Kordofan ( ar, كردفان ') is a former province of central Sudan. In 1994 it was divided into three new federal states: North Kordofan, South Kordofan and West Kordofan. In August 2005, West Kordofan State was abolished and its territory ...

Reconstruction

A reconstruction of Proto-Nubian has been proposed by Claude Rilly (2010: 272-273).Rilly, Claude. 2010. ''Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique''. Leuven: Peeters Publishers.

Orthography

There are three currently active proposals for a Nubian alphabet: based on the

Arabic script The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it or a script directly derived from it, and th ...

, the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern ...

and the Old Nubian alphabet. In the publication of various books of proverbs, dictionaries, and textbooks since the 1950s, Latin has been used by four authors, Arabic by two authors, and Old Nubian by three authors. For Arabic, the extended

ISESCO The Islamic World Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ICESCO, formerly ISESCO) is a specialized organization that operates under the aegis of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), and is concerned with fields of education ...

system may be used to indicate vowels and consonants not found in the Arabic alphabet itself.

References

Sources

* Abdel-Hafiz, A. (1988). ''A Reference Grammar of Kunuz Nubian.'' PhD Thesis, SUNY, Buffalo, NY. * Adams, W. Y. (1982). 'The coming of Nubian speakers to the Nile Valley', in ''The Archeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History.'' Edited by C. Ehret & M. Posnansky. Berkeley / Los Angeles, 11–38. * Armbruster, Charles Hubert (1960). ''Dongolese Nubian: A Grammar''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. * Armbruster, Charles Hubert (1965). ''Dongolese Nubian: A Lexicon''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. * Asmaa M. I. Ahmed, "Suggestions for Writing Modern Nubian Languages", and Muhammad J. A. Hashim, "Competing Orthographies for Writing Nobiin Nubian", in ''Occasional Papers in the Study of Sudanese Languages No. 9'', SIL/Sudan, Entebbe, 2004. * Ayoub, A. (1968). ''The Verbal System in a Dialect of Nubian.'' Khartoum: University of Khartoum. * Bechhaus-Gerst, Marianne (1989). 'Nile-Nubian Reconsidered', in ''Topics in Nilo-Saharan Linguistics''. Edited by M. Lionel Bender. Hamburg: Heinrich Buske. * * Bechhaus-Gerst, Marianne (2011). ''The (Hi)story of Nobiin: 1000 Years of Language Change. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. * Erman, Adolf (1881). 'Die Aloa-Inschriften.' ''Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 19, no. 4." 112–15. * Jakobi, Angelika & Tanja Kümmerle (1993). ''The Nubian Languages: An Annotated Bibliography.'' Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. * Khalil, Mokhtar (1996). ''Wörterbuch der nubischen Sprache.'' Warsaw: Nubica. * Rilly, Claude (2010). ''Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique.'' Leuven: Peeters. * * * Starostin, George (2011). 'Explaining a Lexicostatistical Anomaly for Nubian Languages,' lecture, May 25, 2011
Online version.
* Thelwall, Robin (1982). 'Linguistic Aspects of Greater Nubian History', in ''The Archeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History.'' Edited by C. Ehret & M. Posnansky. Berkeley/Los Angeles, 39–56
Online version.
* Werner, Roland (1987). Grammatik des Nobiin (Nilnubisch). Hamburg: Helmut Buske. * Werner, Roland (1993). Tìdn-Àal: A Study of Midoob (Darfur Nubian). Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.

External links

Swadesh List comparing basic words of the Nubian languages

Panafrican localization page on Nubian
(summaries of information, links)

The Lucky Bilingual: Ethnography of Factors Influencing Code-switching Among the Nubian Community in Southern Egypt
*Music video by Sudanese women's group Al Balabil, featuring th
Nubian song "The Boat Set Sail" ("بابور كسونا")
with English translation *Music video featuring Nubian musician

Hamza El Din Hamza El Din (Arabic حمزة علاء الدين) (July 10, 1929 – May 22, 2006) was an Egyptian Nubian composer, oud player, tar player, and vocalist. He was born in southern Egypt and was an internationally known musician of his native regi ...

's song
Helalisa
' {{Authority control Nubia Language families Languages of Egypt Languages of Sudan Northern Eastern Sudanic languages