TheNubian languages are a group of related languages spoken by theNubians. Nubian languages were spoken throughout much ofSudan, but as a result ofArabization they are today mostly limited to theNile Valley betweenAswan (southernEgypt) andAl Dabbah. In the 1956 Census of Sudan there were 167,831 speakers of Nubian languages.[2] Nubian is not to be confused with the variousNuba languages spoken in villages in theNuba Mountains andDarfur.[3]
More recent classifications, such as those inGlottolog, consider that Nubian languages form a primarylanguage family. Older classifications consider Nubian to be a branch of theNilo-Saharan phylum, a proposal that has low support amonglinguists due to a lack of supporting data.
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Old Nubian is preserved in at least a hundred pages of documents, comprising both texts of aChristian religious nature and documentary texts dealing with state and legal affairs. Old Nubian was written with a slanteduncial variety of theCoptic alphabet, with the addition of characters derived fromMeroitic. 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 withDongolawi.
Another as yet undeciphered Nubian language has been preserved in a few inscriptions found inSoba andMusawwarat es-Sufra, and is assumed to have been the language of the kingdom ofAlodia. 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.[4]
A reconstruction of Proto-Nubian has been proposed by Claude Rilly (2010: 272–273).[5]
A page from anOld Nubian translation of theInvestiture of the Archangel Michael, from the 9th–10th century, found atQasr Ibrim, now at theBritish Museum.Michael's name appears in red: Nubians during the period frequently used Greek personal names, often with a terminal ‑ⲓ added.Marble Monument found in Soba with an as yet undeciphered inscription in Alwan Nubian
The following Nubian languages are distinguished, spoken by in total about 950,000 speakers:
Nobiin, is the largest Nubian language with 685,000 speakers inEgypt,Sudan, and the Nubian diaspora. Previously known by the geographic terms Mahas and Fadicca/Fiadicca.[6]
Kenzi (endonym: Mattokki) with 35,000 speakers inEgypt[7] andDongolawi (endonym: Andaandi) with 35,000 speakers inSudan.[8] 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.[9] Dongolawi is now spoken as far south ased-Debbah, but as late as the 19th century could be found as far south asKorti and probably even further upstream.[10]
Midob (Meidob) with 93,000 speakers.[11] The language is spoken primarily in and around the Malha volcanic crater in NorthDarfur.
Birgid, now extinct, was spoken north ofNyala around Menawashei, with the last known speakers alive in the 1970s. It was the predominant language between the corridor of Nyala andal-Fashir in the north and theBahr al-Arab in the south as recently as 1860.[12]
Hill Nubian or Kordofan Nubian, a group of closely related languages or dialects spoken in various villages in the northernNuba Mountains; in particular by theDilling,Debri, andKadaru. An extinct language,Haraza, is known only from a few dozen words recalled by village elders in 1923.[13][14]
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 notablyLepsius (1880), Reinisch (1879) andMeinhof (1918); other early Nubian scholars include Almkvist andSchäfer. Additionally, importantcomparative 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.
Relations between the Nubian languages. Lines indicate genealogical relations, dotted lines linguistic influence; asterisks (*) mark languages unattested in writing, daggers (†) mark dead languages.
Traditionally, the Nubian languages are divided into three branches: Northern (Nile), Western (Darfur), and Central.Ethnologue's classifies the Nubian languages as follows:.[15]
Glottolog 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.[16]
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 theMeroitic. Approaching the inherited proto-Nubian vocabulary in all Nubian languages systematically through a comparative linguistic approach, Rilly arrives at the following classification:[17]
There are three currently active proposals for a Nubian alphabet: based on theArabic script, theGreek script, theLatin script and theOld 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 extendedISESCO system may be used to indicate vowels and consonants not found in theArabic alphabet itself.
^Adams, W. Y. (1982). "The coming of Nubian speakers to the Nile Valley", inThe Archeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History. Edited by C. Ehret & M. Posnansky. Berkeley / Los Angeles, p. 38
^Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017)."Haraza Nubian".Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
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", inThe 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", inOccasional 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", inTopics in Nilo-Saharan Linguistics. Edited by M. Lionel Bender. Hamburg: Heinrich Buske.
Bechhaus-Gerst, Marianne (1996).Sprachwandel durch Sprachkontakt am Beispiel des Nubischen im Niltal (in German). Cologne: Köppe.ISBN3-927620-26-2.
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.
Spaulding, Jay (2006). "Pastoralism, Slavery, Commerce, Culture and the Fate of the Nubians of Northern and Central Kordofan Under Dar Fur Rule, ca. 1750-ca. 1850".The International Journal of African Historical Studies.39 (3). Boston University African Studies Center.ISSN0361-7882.
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", inThe 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.
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