The Nubian languages are a group of related languages spoken by the Nubians. Nubian languages were spoken throughout much of Sudan, but as a result of Arabization they are today mostly limited to the Nile Valley between Aswan (southern Egypt) and Al Dabbah. In the 1956 Census of Sudan there were 167,831 speakers of Nubian languages.
More recent classifications, such as those in Glottolog, consider that Nubian languages form a primary language family. Older classifications consider Nubian to be a branch of the Nilo-Saharan phylum, a proposal that has low support among Linguistics due to a lack of supporting data.
History
Old Nubian is preserved in at least a hundred pages of documents, comprising both texts of a
Christianity religious nature and documentary texts dealing with state and legal affairs. Old Nubian was written with a slanted
uncial variety of the
Coptic alphabet, with the addition of characters derived from
Meroitic script. 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 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).[Rilly, Claude. 2010. Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique. Leuven: Peeters Publishers. ]
Present-day languages
The following Nubian languages are distinguished, spoken by in total about 950,000 speakers:
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Nobiin language, is the largest Nubian language with 685,000 speakers in Egypt, Sudan, and the Nubian diaspora. Previously known by the geographic terms Mahas and Fadicca/Fiadicca.
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Kenzi language (endonym: Mattokki) with 35,000 speakers in Egypt
[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, p. 38] 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.
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Midob language (Meidob) with 93,000 speakers.
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Birgid language, now extinct, was spoken north of Nyala 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.
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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 language, Debri language, and Kadaru language. An extinct language, Haraza language, is known only from a few dozen words recalled by village elders in 1923.
[Herman Bell (1975) " Documentary Evidence on the Haraza Nubian Language "]
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 Carl Meinhof (1918); other early Nubian scholars include Almkvist and Schäfer. Additionally, important comparative 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:.
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Nubian
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Northern (Nile)
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Western (Darfur)
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Central
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.
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:
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Nubian
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Nile Nubian
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Old Nubian
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Kenzi-Dongolawi
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Western Nubian
Orthography
There are three currently active proposals for a Nubian alphabet: based on the
Arabic script, the
Greek script, the
Latin script 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 system may be used to indicate vowels and consonants not found in the
Arabic alphabet itself.
See also
Sources
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Abdel-Hafiz, A. (1988). A Reference Grammar of Kunuz Nubian. PhD Thesis, SUNY, Buffalo, NY.
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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.
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Armbruster, Charles Hubert (1960). Dongolese Nubian: A Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Armbruster, Charles Hubert (1965). Dongolese Nubian: A Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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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.
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Ayoub, A. (1968). The Verbal System in a Dialect of Nubian. Khartoum: University of Khartoum.
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Bechhaus-Gerst, Marianne (1989). "Nile-Nubian Reconsidered", in Topics in Nilo-Saharan Linguistics. Edited by M. Lionel Bender. Hamburg: Heinrich Buske.
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Bechhaus-Gerst, Marianne (2011). The (Hi)story of Nobiin: 1000 Years of Language Change. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
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Erman, Adolf (1881). "Die Aloa-Inschriften." Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 19, no. 4. 112–15.
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Jakobi, Angelika & Tanja Kümmerle (1993). The Nubian Languages: An Annotated Bibliography. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.
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Khalil, Mokhtar (1996). Wörterbuch der nubischen Sprache. Warsaw: Nubica.
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Rilly, Claude (2010). Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique. Leuven: Peeters.
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Starostin, George (2011). Explaining a Lexicostatistical Anomaly for Nubian Languages (lecture) May 25, 2011. Online version.
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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.
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Werner, Roland (1987). Grammatik des Nobiin (Nilnubisch). Hamburg: Helmut Buske.
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Werner, Roland (1993). Tìdn-Àal: A Study of Midoob (Darfur Nubian). Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.
External links
