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Nobiin, also known asHalfawi,Mahas, is aNubian language of theNilo-Saharan language family. "Nobiin" is thegenitive form ofNòòbíí ("Nubian") and literally means "(language) of theNubians". Another term used isNoban tamen, meaning "the Nubian language".^[2]

At least 2500 years ago, the first Nubian speakers migrated into theNile valley from the southwest.Old Nubian is thought to be ancestral to Nobiin. Nobiin is atonal language with contrastive vowel and consonant length. The basic word order issubject–object–verb.

Nobiin is currently spoken along the banks of the Nile inUpper Egypt and northernSudan by approximately 610,000 Nubians. In 1996 there were 295,000 Nobiin speakers inSudan, and in 2006 there were 310,000 Nobiin speakers inEgypt.^[3] It is spoken by the Fedicca in Egypt and theMahas and Halfawi tribes in Sudan. Present-day Nobiin speakers are almost universallymultilingual in local varieties ofArabic, generally speakingModern Standard Arabic (for official purposes) as well asSaʽidi Arabic,Egyptian Arabic, orSudanese Arabic. Many Nobiin-speaking Nubians were forced to relocate in 1963–1964 to make room for the construction of theAswan Dam atAswan, Egypt and for the upstreamLake Nasser.^[4]

There is no standardisedorthography for Nobiin. It has been written in bothLatin andArabic scripts; also, recently there have been efforts to revive theOld Nubian alphabet. This article adopts the Latin orthography used in the only publishedgrammar of Nobiin, Roland Werner's (1987)Grammatik des Nobiin.

Before the construction of theAswan Dam, speakers of Nobiin lived in the Nile valley between the thirdcataract in the south and Korosko in the north. About 60% of the territory ofNubia was destroyed or rendered unfit for habitation as a result of the construction of the dam and the creation ofLake Nasser. At least half of the Nubian population was forcibly resettled.^[5] Nowadays, Nobiin speakers live in the following areas: (1) nearKom Ombo, Egypt, about 40 km north ofAswan, where new housing was provided by the Egyptian government for approximately 50,000 Nubians; (2) in theNew Halfa Scheme in theKassala, Sudan, where housing and work was provided by the Sudanese government for Nubians from the inundated areas aroundWadi Halfa; (3) in theNorthern state, Sudan, northwards fromBurgeg to the Egyptian border atWadi Halfa. Additionally, many Nubians have moved to large cities likeCairo andKhartoum. In recent years, some of the resettled Nubians have returned to their traditional territories around Abu Simbel and Wadi Halfa.

Practically all speakers of Nobiin are bilingual inEgyptian Arabic orSudanese Arabic. For the men, this was noted as early as 1819 by the travellerJohann Ludwig Burckhardt in hisTravels to Nubia. The forced resettlement in the second half of the twentieth century also brought more Nubians, especially women and children, into daily contact with Arabic. Chief factors in this development include increased mobility (and hence easy access to non-Nubian villages and cities), changes in social patterns such as women going more often to the market to sell their own products, and easy access to Arabic newspapers.^[6] In urban areas, many Nubian women go to school and are fluent in Arabic; they usually address their children in Arabic, reserving Nobiin for their husband. In response to concerns about a possible language shift to Arabic, Werner notes a very positive language attitude.^[7] Rouchdy (1992a) however notes that use of Nobiin is confined mainly to the domestic circle, as Arabic is the dominant language in trade, education, and public life. Sociolinguistically, the situation may be described as one ofstable bilingualism: the dominant language (Arabic in this case), although used widely, does not easily replace the minority language since the latter is tightly connected to the Nubian identity.^[8]

Nobiin has been calledMahas(i),Mahas-Fiadidja, andFiadicca in the past. Mahas and Fiadidja are geographical terms which correspond to two dialectal variants of Nobiin; the differences between these two dialects are negligible, and some have argued that there is no evidence of a dialectal distinction at all.^[9] Nobiin should not be confused with theNubi language, an Arabic-based creole.

Nobiin is one of the fewlanguages 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 byGerald M. Browne (1944–2004), is considered ancestral to Nobiin. Many manuscripts, includingNubian 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 ofNobatia,Makuria andAlodia.

The otherNubian languages are found hundreds of kilometers to the southwest, inDarfur and in theNuba Mountains ofKordofan. 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 theShaigiya 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 (seeclassification below).

Since the seventh century, Nobiin has been challenged byArabic. The economic and cultural influence of Egypt over the region was considerable, and, over the centuries,Egyptian Arabic spread south. Areas likeal-Maris became almost fully Arabized. The conversion of Nubia toIslam after the fall of the Christian kingdoms further enhanced theArabization process. In what is today Sudan, Sudanese Arabic became the mainvernacular of theFunj 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 theOttoman 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.

Nobiin is one of the about elevenNubian languages.^{[citation needed]} 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 theHill 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-inducedlanguage 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 theEastern Sudanic branch of theNilo-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 theTaman group, with an average lexical similarity of just 22.2 per cent.

Nobiin has open and closedsyllables:ág'mouth',één'woman',gíí'uncle',kám'camel',díís'blood'. Every syllable bears a tone. Long consonants are only found in intervocalic position, whereas long vowels can occur in initial, medial and final position.Phonotactically, there might be a weak relationship between the occurrence of consonant and vowel length: forms likedàrrìl'climb' anddààrìl'be present' are found, but*dàrìl (short V + short C) and*dààrrìl (long V + long C) do not exist; similarly,féyyìr 'grow' andfééyìr 'lose (a battle)' occur, but not*féyìr and*fééyyìr.

Nobiin has a five-vowel system. The vowels/e/ and/o/ can be realizedclose-mid or moreopen-mid (as[ɛ] and[ɔ], respectively). Vowels can be long or short, e.g.,jáákí'fear' (long/aː/),jàkkàr'fish-hook' (short/a/). However, manynouns are unstable with regard tovowel length; thus,bálé~báléé'feast',ííg~íg'fire',shártí~sháártí'spear'.Diphthongs are interpreted as sequences of vowels and the glides/w/ and/j/.

Consonant length is contrastive in Nobiin, e.g.,dáwwí'path' vs.dáwí'kitchen'. Like vowel length, consonant length is not very stable; long consonants tend to be shortened in many cases (e.g., the Arabic loandùkkáán'shop' is often found asdùkáán).

The phoneme/p/ has a somewhat marginal status as it only occurs as a result of certain morphophonological processes. The voiced plosive/b/ is mainly in contrast with/f/. Originally,[z] only occurred as anallophone of/s/ before voiced consonants; however, through the influx of loanwords from Arabic it has acquired phonemic status:àzáábí'pain'. The glottal fricative[h] occurs as an allophone of/s,t,k,f,ɡ/:síddó →híddó'where?';tánnátóón →tánnáhóón'of him/her';ày fàkàbìr →ày hàkàbìr'I will eat';dòllàkúkkàn →dòllàhúkkàn'he has loved'. This process is unidirectional, i.e., /h/ will never change into one of the above consonants, and it has been termed'consonant switching' (Konsonantenwechsel) by Werner.^[15] Only in very few words, if any, does [h] have independent phonemic status: Werner listshíssí'voice' andhòòngìr'braying', but it might be noted that the latter example is less convincing because of its probablyonomatopoeic nature. The alveolar liquids/l/ and/r/ are infree variation as in many African languages. The approximant/w/ is a voiced labial-velar.

Nobiin is atonal language, in which pitch is used to marklexical contrasts. Tone also figures heavily inmorphological derivation. Nobiin has twounderlying tones, high and low. A falling tone occurs in certain contexts; this tone can in general be analysed as arising from a high and a low tone together.

• árré'settlement' (high)
• nùùr'shadow' (low)

In Nobiin, every utterance ends in a low tone. This is one of the clearest signs of the occurrence of aboundary tone, realized as a low pitch on the last syllable of anyprepausal word. The examples below show how the surface tone of the high tone verbókkír-'cook' depends on the position of the verb. In the first sentence, the verb is not final (because the question marker-náà is appended) and thus it is realized as high. In the second sentence, the verb is at the end of the utterance, resulting in a low tone on the last syllable.

Tone plays an important role in several derivational processes. The most common situation involves the loss of the original tone pattern of the derivational base and the subsequent assignment of low tone, along with the affixation of a morpheme or word bringing its own tonal pattern (seebelow for examples).

For a long time, the Nile Nubian languages were thought to be non-tonal; early analyses employed terms like "stress" or "accent" to describe the phenomena now recognized as a tone system.^[16]Carl Meinhof reported that only remnants of a tone system could be found in the Nubian languages. He based this conclusion not only on his own data, but also on the observation that Old Nubian had been written without tonal marking. Based on accounts like Meinhof's, Nobiin was considered a toneless language for the first half of the twentieth century.^[17] The statements ofde facto authorities like Meinhof,Diedrich Hermann Westermann, andIda C. Ward heavily affected the next three decades of linguistic theorizing about stress and tone in Nobiin. As late as 1968, Herman Bell was the first scholar to develop an account of tone in Nobiin. Although his analysis was still hampered by the occasional confusion of accent and tone, he is credited by Roland Werner as being the first to recognize that Nobiin is a genuinely tonal language, and the first to lay down some elementary tonal rules.^[18]

The basicpersonal pronouns of Nobiin are:

• ày-I
• ìr-you (singular)
• tàr-he, she, it
• ùù-we
• úr-you (plural)
• tér-they

There are three sets ofpossessive pronouns. One of them is transparently derived from the set of personal pronouns plus a connexive suffix-íín. Another set is less clearly related to the simple personal pronouns; all possessive pronouns of this set bear a high tone. The third set is derived from the second set by appending the nominalizing suffix-ní.

Nobiin has twodemonstrative pronouns:ìn 'this', denoting things nearby, andmán 'that', denoting things farther away. Both can function as the subject or the object in a sentence; in the latter case they take the object marker-gá yieldingìngà andmángá, respectively (for the object marker, see alsobelow). The demonstrative pronoun always precedes the nouns it refers to.

Nouns in Nobiin are predominantlydisyllabic, although mono- and three- or four-syllabic nouns are also found. Nouns can be derived from adjectives, verbs, or other nouns by appending varioussuffixes. In forming theplural, the tone of a noun becomes low and one of four plural markers is suffixed. Two of these are low in tone, while the other two have a high tone.

• -ìì (L):féntí →fèntìì '(sweet) dates'
• -ncìì (L):àrréé →àrèèncìì 'falls'
• -ríí (H):áádèm →ààdèmríí 'men, people'
• -gúú (H):kúrsí →kùrsìgúú 'chairs'

In most cases it is not predictable which plural suffix a noun will take. Furthermore, many nouns can take different suffixes, e.g.,ág 'mouth' →àgìì/àgríí. However, nouns that have final-éé usually take Plural 2 (-ncìì), whereas disyllabic low-high nouns typically take Plural 1 (-ìì).

Gender is expressed lexically, occasionally by use of a suffix, but more often with a different noun altogether, or, in the case of animals, by use of a separate nominal elementóndí 'masculine' orkàrréé 'feminine':

• íd 'man' vs.ìdéén 'woman'
• tòòd 'boy' vs.búrú 'girl'
• kàjkàrréé 'she-ass' vs.kàjnóndí 'donkey'

The pairmale slave/female slave forms an interesting exception, showing gender marking through different endings of the lexeme:òsshí 'slave (m.)' vs.òsshá 'slave (f.)'. AnOld Nubian equivalent which does not seem to show the gender isooshonaeigou 'slaves'; the plural suffix-gou has a modern equivalent in-gúú (see above).

Incompound nouns composed of two nouns, the tone of the first noun becomes low while the appended noun keeps its own tonal pattern.

• kàdíís 'cat' +mórrí 'wild' →kàdììs-mórrí 'wild cat'
• ìkìríí 'guest' +nóóg 'house' →ìskìrììn-nóóg 'guest room'
• tògój 'sling' +kìd 'stone' →tògòj-kìd 'sling stone'

Many compounds are found in two forms, one morelexicalized than the other. Thus, it is common to find both the coordinated noun phraseháhám ámán 'the water of the river' and the compound nounbàhàm-ámán 'river-water', distinguished by their tonal pattern.

Verbal morphology in Nobiin is subject to numerousmorphophonological processes, including syllable contraction, vowelelision, andassimilation of all sorts and directions. A distinction needs to be made between the verbal base and the morphemes that follow. The majority of verbal bases in Nobiin end in a consonant (e.g.nèèr- 'sleep',kàb- 'eat',tíg- 'follow',fìyyí- 'lie'); notable exceptions arejúú- 'go' andníí- 'drink'. Verbal bases are mono- or disyllabic. The verbal base carries one of three or four tonal patterns. The main verb carries person, number, tense, and aspect information.

Only rarely do verbal bases occur without appended morphemes. One such case is the use of the verbjúú- 'go' in aserial verb-like construction.

The basic word order in a Nobiin sentence issubject–object–verb. Objects are marked by an object suffix-gá, often assimilating to the final consonant of the word (e.g.,kìtááb 'book',kìtááppá 'book-OBJECT' as seen below). In a sentence containing both an indirect and a direct object, the object marker is suffixed to both.

Questions can be constructed in various ways in Nobiin. Constituent questions ('Type 1', questions about 'who?', 'what?', etc.) are formed by use of a set of verbal suffixes in conjunction with question words. Simple interrogative utterances ('Type 2') are formed by use of another set of verbal suffixes.

Some of the suffixes are similar. Possible ambiguities are resolved by the context. Some examples:

Old Nubian, considered ancestral to Nobiin, was written in aCoptic-like script, anuncial variety of theGreek alphabet, extended with three Coptic letters —ϣ "sh"/ʃ/,ϩ "h"/h/, andϭ "j"/ɟ/ — and three unique to Nubian: ⳡ "ny"/ɲ/ and ⳣ "w"/w/, apparently derived from theMeroitic alphabet; and ⳟ "ng"/ŋ/, thought to be a ligature of two Greekgammas.

There are three currently active proposals for the script of Nobiin (Asmaa 2004, Hashim 2004): theArabic script, theLatin script and theOld Nubian alphabet. Since the 1950s,^{[until when?]} Latin has been used by 4 authors, Arabic by 2, and Old Nubian by 1, in the publication of various books of proverbs, dictionaries, and textbooks. For Arabic, the extendedIslamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization system may be used to indicate vowels and consonants not found in Arabic itself.

More recent educational material implements the teaching and using of the Nubian alphabet.^[19]

• Nobiin audio samples and alphabet
• Nobiin basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
• New website with Nobiin texts and audio samples: www.nobiin.com
• ELAR Archivedeposit of Nobíin, aNubian language by Kirsty Rowan & Herman Bell

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