Nobiin language
Nobiin, also known as Halfawi, Mahas, is a Nubian language of the Nilo-Saharan language family. "Nobiin" is the genitive form of Nòòbíí ("Nubian") and literally means "(language) of the Nubians". Another term used is Noban tamen, meaning "the Nubian language".[2]
Nobiin
Along the banks of the Nile in southern Egypt and northern Sudan
680,000 (2023)[1]
Coptic script (Old Nubian variant)
Latin alphabet
Arabic alphabet
At least 2500 years ago, the first Nubian speakers migrated into the Nile valley from the southwest. Old Nubian is thought to be ancestral to Nobiin. Nobiin is a tonal language with contrastive vowel and consonant length. The basic word order is subject–object–verb.
Nobiin is currently spoken along the banks of the Nile in Upper Egypt and northern Sudan by approximately 610,000 Nubians. In 1996 there were 295,000 Nobiin speakers in Sudan, and in 2006 there were 310,000 Nobiin speakers in Egypt.[3] It is spoken by the Fedicca in Egypt and the Mahas and Halfawi tribes in Sudan. Present-day Nobiin speakers are almost universally multilingual in local varieties of Arabic, generally speaking Modern Standard Arabic (for official purposes) as well as Saʽidi Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, or Sudanese Arabic. Many Nobiin-speaking Nubians were forced to relocate in 1963–1964 to make room for the construction of the Aswan Dam at Aswan, Egypt and for the upstream Lake Nasser.[4]
There is no standardised orthography for Nobiin. It has been written in both Latin and Arabic scripts; also, recently there have been efforts to revive the Old Nubian alphabet. This article adopts the Latin orthography used in the only published grammar of Nobiin, Roland Werner's (1987) Grammatik des Nobiin.
History[edit]
Nobiin is one of the few languages of Africa to have a written history that can be followed over the course of more than a millennium. Old Nubian, preserved in a sizable collection of mainly early Christian manuscripts and documented in detail by Gerald M. Browne (1944–2004), is considered ancestral to Nobiin. Many manuscripts, including Nubian Biblical texts, have been unearthed in the Nile Valley, mainly between the first and fifth cataracts, testifying to a firm Nubian presence in the area during the first millennium. A dialect cluster related to Nobiin, Dongolawi, is found in the same area. The Nile-Nubian languages were the languages of the Christian Nubian kingdoms of Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia.
The other Nubian languages are found hundreds of kilometers to the southwest, in Darfur and in the Nuba Mountains of Kordofan. For a long time it was assumed that the Nubian peoples dispersed from the Nile Valley to the south, probably at the time of the downfall of the Christian kingdoms. However, comparative lexicostatistic research in the second half of the twentieth century has shown that the spread must have been in the opposite direction. Joseph Greenberg (as cited in Thelwall 1982) calculated that a split between Hill Nubian and the two Nile-Nubian languages occurred at least 2500 years ago. This is corroborated by the fact that the oral tradition of the Shaigiya tribe of the Jaali group of arabized Nile Nubians tells of coming from the southwest long ago. The speakers of Nobiin are thought to have come to the area before the speakers of the related Kenzi-Dongolawi languages (see classification below).
Since the seventh century, Nobiin has been challenged by Arabic. The economic and cultural influence of Egypt over the region was considerable, and, over the centuries, Egyptian Arabic spread south. Areas like al-Maris became almost fully Arabized. The conversion of Nubia to Islam after the fall of the Christian kingdoms further enhanced the Arabization process. In what is today Sudan, Sudanese Arabic became the main vernacular of the Funj Sultanate, with Nobiin becoming a minority tongue. In Egypt, the Nobiin speakers were also part of a largely Arabic-speaking state, but Egyptian control over the south was limited. With the Ottoman conquest of the region in the sixteenth century, official support for Arabization largely ended, as the Turkish and Circassian governments in Cairo sometimes saw Nobiin speakers as a useful ally. However, as Arabic remained a language of high importance in Sudan and especially Egypt, Nobiin continued to be under pressure, and its use became largely confined to Nubian homes.
Classification[edit]
Nobiin is one of the about eleven Nubian languages. It has traditionally been grouped with the Dongolawi cluster, mainly based on the geographic proximity of the two (before the construction of the Aswan Dam, varieties of Dongolawi were spoken north and south of the Nobiin area, in Kunuz and Dongola respectively). The uniformity of this 'Nile-Nubian' branch was first called into doubt by Thelwall (1982) who argued, based on lexicostatistical evidence, that Nobiin must have split off from the other Nubian languages earlier than Dongolawi. In Thelwall's classification, Nobiin forms a "Northern" branch on its own whereas Dongolawi is considered part of Central Nubian, along with Birged (North Darfur) and the Hill Nubian languages (Nuba Mountains, Kordofan).[10]
In recent times, research by Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst has shed more light on the relations between Nobiin and Dongolawi. The groups have been separated so long that they do not share a common identity; additionally, they differ in their traditions about their origins.[11] The languages are clearly genetically related, but the picture is complicated by the fact that there are also indications of contact-induced language change.[12] Nobiin appears to have had a strong influence on Dongolawi, as evidenced by similarities between the phoneme inventories as well as the occurrence of numerous borrowed grammatical morphemes. This has led some to suggest that Dongolawi in fact is "a 'hybrid' language between old Nobiin and pre-contact Dongolawi."[13] Evidence of the reverse influence is much rarer, although there are some late loans in Nobiin which are thought to come from Dongolawi.[14]
The Nubian languages are part of the Eastern Sudanic branch of the Nilo-Saharan languages. On the basis of a comparison with seventeen other Eastern Sudanic languages, Thelwall (1982) considers Nubian to be most closely related to Tama, a member of the Taman group, with an average lexical similarity of just 22.2 per cent.
Grammar[edit]
Pronouns[edit]
The basic personal pronouns of Nobiin are: