Geographic
distribution Sudan, Egypt Glottolog nubi1251 | ISO 639-2 / 5 nub | |
Linguistic classification Nilo-Saharan?
Eastern Sudanic
Astaboran
Nubian Subdivisions Northern (Nobiin)
Central
Western (Midob) | ||
The Nubian languages (Arabic: لغات نوبية) are the indigenous languages of Nubia, along the Nile in southern Egypt and northern Sudan. In the 1973 Arab–Israeli War Egypt employed Nubian-speaking Nubian people as codetalkers.
Contents
Languages
Bechhaus-Gerst (1996) finds the following varieties:
- Nobiin, the largest Nubian language. Previously known by the geographic terms Mahas and Fadicca/Fiadicca.
- Midob (Meidob) in and around the Malha volcanic crater in North Darfur.
- Kenzi and Dongolawi. No longer considered a single language. May be closest to Birgid.
- Birgid. Spoken north of Nyala around Menawashei until the 1970s. The last surviving aged speakers were interviewed by Thelwall at this time. Some equally aged speakers on Gezira Aba just north of Kosti on the Nile south of Khartoum were interviewed by Thelwall in 1980.
- Hill Nubian – a group of closely related dialects spoken in various villages in the northern Nuba Mountains – in particular Dilling, Debri, and Kadaru.
An additional language, Haraza, is known only from a few dozen words recalled by village elders in 1923.
Old Nubian is preserved in at least a hundred pages of documents, mostly of a Christian religious nature, written with an uncial variety of the Greek alphabet, extended with three Coptic letters and three unique to Old Nubian, apparently 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.
Synchronic research on the Nubian languages began in the last decades of the nineteenth century, first focusing on the Nile Nubian languages Nobiin and Dongolawi/Kenzi. 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 work on the Nubian languages has been carried out by Thelwall and Bechhaus-Gerst in the second half of the twentieth century.
Orthography
There are three currently active proposals for a Nubian alphabet: based on the Arabic script, the Latin script, and the Old Nubian alphabet. Since the 1950s, Latin has been used by four authors, Arabic by two, and Old Nubian by one, in the publication of various books of proverbs, dictionaries, and textbooks. For Arabic, the extended ISESCO system may be used to indicate vowels and consonants not found in the Arabic alphabet itself.