The Nubian languages are a group of related languages spoken by the

Nubians Nubians () ( Nobiin: ''Nobī,'' ) are a Nilo-Saharan speaking 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 th ...

. Nubian languages were spoken throughout much of

Sudan Sudan, officially the Republic of the Sudan, is a country in Northeast Africa. It borders the Central African Republic to the southwest, Chad to the west, Libya to the northwest, Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the east, Eritrea and Ethiopi ...

, but as a result of

Arabization Arabization or Arabicization () is a sociology, sociological process of cultural change in which a non-Arab society becomes Arabs, Arab, meaning it either directly adopts or becomes strongly influenced by the Arabic, Arabic language, Arab cultu ...

they are today mostly limited to the

Nile Valley The Nile (also known as the Nile River or River Nile) is a major north-flowing river in northeastern Africa. It flows into the Mediterranean Sea. The Nile is the longest river in Africa. It has historically been considered the longest river i ...

between

Aswan Aswan (, also ; ) 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 Nile at the first cataract. The modern city ha ...

(southern

Egypt Egypt ( , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country spanning the Northeast Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to northe ...

) and Al Dabbah. In the 1956 Census of Sudan there were 167,831 speakers of Nubian languages. Nubian is not to be confused with the various Nuba languages spoken in villages in the Nuba mountains and

Darfur Darfur ( ; ) is a region of western Sudan. ''Dār'' is an Arabic word meaning "home f – the region was named Dardaju () while ruled by the Daju, who migrated from Meroë , and it was renamed Dartunjur () when the Tunjur ruled the area. ...

. More recent classifications, such as those in

Glottolog ''Glottolog'' is an open-access online bibliographic database of the world's languages. In addition to listing linguistic materials ( grammars, articles, dictionaries) describing individual languages, the database also contains the most up-to-d ...

, consider that Nubian languages form a primary

language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term ''family'' is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics ...

. Older classifications consider Nubian to be a branch of the Nilo-Saharan phylum, a proposal that has low support among

linguists Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds and equivalent gestures ...

due to a lack of supporting data.

History

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 through ...

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

Christian A Christian () is a person who follows or adheres to Christianity, a Monotheism, monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus in Christianity, Jesus Christ. Christians form the largest religious community in the wo ...

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

uncial Uncial is a majuscule script (written entirely in capital letters) commonly used from the 4th to 8th centuries AD by Latin and Greek scribes. Uncial letters were used to write Greek and Latin, as well as Gothic, and are the current style for ...

variety of the

Coptic alphabet The Coptic alphabet is the script used for writing the Coptic language, the most recent development of Egyptian. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the uncial Greek alphabet, augmented by letters borrowed from the Egyptian Demotic. It was ...

, 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") are Japanese noodles made primarily from buckwheat flour, with a small amount of wheat flour mixed in. It has an ashen brown color, and a slightly grainy texture. The noodles are served either chilled with a dipping sau ...

and Musawwarat es-Sufra and is assumed to have been the language of the kingdom of Alodia. Since their publication by Adolf Ermann in 1881, they have been referred to as 'Alwan inscriptions', 'Alwan Nubian or 'Soba Nubian'. This language appears to have become extinct by the 19th century. A reconstruction of Proto-Nubian has been proposed by Claude Rilly (2010: 272–273).

Present-day languages

The following Nubian languages are distinguished, spoken by in total about 950,000 speakers: # Nobiin, is the largest Nubian language with 685,000 speakers in

, and the Nubian diaspora. Previously known by the geographic terms Mahas and Fadicca/Fiadicca. # Kenzi (

endonym An endonym (also known as autonym ) is a common, name for a group of people, individual person, geographical place, language, or dialect, meaning that it is used inside a particular group or linguistic community to identify or designate them ...

: Mattokki) with 35,000 speakers in

and Dongolawi (

: Andaandi) with 35,000 speakers in

. They are no longer considered a single language, but closely related. The split between Kenzi and Dongolawi is dated relatively recently to around the 15th century. Dongolawi is now spoken as far south as ed-Debbah, but as late as the 19th century could be found as far south as Korti and probably even further upstream. # Midob (Meidob) with 93,000 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 artiodactyl antelope native to Southern Africa. The species is part of the family Bovidae and the genus '' Tragelaphus'' (formerly placed in the genus ''Nyala''). It ...

around Menawashei, with the last known speakers alive in the 1970s. It was the predominant language between the corridor of Nyala and al-Fashir in the north and the Bahr al-Arab 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. 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 (1880), Reinisch (1879) and Meinhof (1918); other early Nubian scholars include Almkvist and Schäfer. Additionally, important

comparative The degrees of comparison of adjectives and adverbs are the various forms taken by adjectives and adverbs when used to compare two entities (comparative degree), three or more entities (superlative degree), or when not comparing entities (positi ...

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:. * Nubian ** Northern (Nile) ***

**** Nobiin ** Western (Darfur) *** Midob ** Central *** Kenzi *** Birgid *** Dongolawi *** Hill (Kordofan) **** Kadaru-Ghulfan ***** Ghulfan ***** Kadaru **** Unclassified *****

Dair Dair is the Irish name of the seventh letter of the Ogham alphabet, ᚇ, meaning "oak". The (Early ) is related to Welsh and to Breton . Its Proto-Indo-European root was ''*dóru'' ("tree"), possibly a deadjectival noun of ''*deru-'', ''*d ...

***** Dilling ***** El Hugeirat ***** Karko *****

Wali The term ''wali'' is most commonly used by Muslims to refer to a saint, or literally a "friend of God".John Renard, ''Friends of God: Islamic Images of Piety, Commitment, and Servanthood'' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); John ...

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: * Nubian ** Nile Nubian ***

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

Kordofan Kordofan ( ') 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 divided between N ...

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 (Arabic alphabet) and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world (after the Latin script), the second-most widel ...

, the

Greek script The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and is the earliest known alphabetic script to systematically write vowels as w ...

, the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a 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 Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

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 The Arabic alphabet, or the Arabic abjad, is the Arabic script as specifically codified for writing the Arabic language. It is a unicase, unicameral script written from right-to-left in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters, of which most ...

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