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 and literally means " of the Nubians". Another term used is Noban tamen, meaning "the Nubian language".
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 685,000 Nubians. In 2023 there were 183,000 Nobiin speakers in Sudan, and in 2024 there were 502,000 Nobiin speakers in Egypt. 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 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.
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 Grammatik des Nobiin.

Geography and demography

Before the construction of the Aswan Dam, speakers of Nobiin lived in the Nile valley between the third cataract in the south and Korosko in the north. About 60% of the territory of Nubia was destroyed or rendered unfit for habitation as a result of the construction of the dam and the creation of Lake Nasser. At least half of the Nubian population was forcibly resettled. Nowadays, Nobiin speakers live in the following areas: near Kom Ombo, Egypt, about 40 km north of Aswan, where new housing was provided by the Egyptian government for approximately 50,000 Nubians; in the New Halfa Scheme in the Kassala, Sudan, where housing and work was provided by the Sudanese government for Nubians from the inundated areas around Wadi Halfa; in the Northern state, Sudan, northwards from Burgeg to the Egyptian border at Wadi Halfa. Additionally, many Nubians have moved to large cities like Cairo and Khartoum. 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 in Egyptian Arabic or Sudanese Arabic. For the men, this was noted as early as 1819 by the traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in his Travels 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, changes in social patterns such as women going more often to the market to sell their own products, and easy access to Arabic newspapers. 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. Rouchdy 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 of stable bilingualism: the dominant language, although used widely, does not easily replace the minority language since the latter is tightly connected to the Nubian identity.
Nobiin has been called Mahas, Mahas-Fiadidja, and Fiadicca 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. Nobiin should not be confused with the Nubi language, an Arabic-based creole.

History

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, 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 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.
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

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. The uniformity of this 'Nile-Nubian' branch was first called into doubt by Thelwall 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 and the Hill Nubian languages.
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. The languages are clearly genetically related, but the picture is complicated by the fact that there are also indications of contact-induced language change. 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." Evidence of the reverse influence is much rarer, although there are some late loans in Nobiin which are thought to come from Dongolawi.
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 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.

Phonology

Nobiin has open and closed syllables: ág, één, gíí, kám, díís. 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 like dàrrìl and dààrìl are found, but *dàrìl and *dààrrìl do not exist; similarly, féyyìr 'grow' and fééyìr 'lose ' occur, but not *féyìr and *fééyyìr.

Vowels

Nobiin has a five-vowel system. The vowels and can be realized close-mid or more open-mid. Vowels can be long or short, e.g., jáákí , jàkkàr . However, many [|nouns] are unstable with regard to vowel length; thus, bálé~báléé, ííg~íg, shártí~sháártí. Diphthongs are interpreted as sequences of vowels and the glides and.

	Front	Central	Back
Close	,		,
Close-mid	,		,
Open		,

Consonants

Consonant length is contrastive in Nobiin, e.g., dáwwí vs. dáwí. Like vowel length, consonant length is not very stable; long consonants tend to be shortened in many cases.
The phoneme has a somewhat marginal status as it only occurs as a result of certain morphophonological processes. The voiced plosive is mainly in contrast with. Originally, only occurred as an allophone of before voiced consonants; however, through the influx of loanwords from Arabic it has acquired phonemic status: àzáábí. The glottal fricative occurs as an allophone of : síddó → híddó ; tánnátóón → tánnáhóón ; ày fàkàbìr → ày hàkàbìr ; dòllàkúkkàn → dòllàhúkkàn. This process is unidirectional, i.e., /h/ will never change into one of the above consonants, and it has been termed by Werner. Only in very few words, if any, does have independent phonemic status: Werner lists híssí and hòòngìr, but it might be noted that the latter example is less convincing because of its probably onomatopoeic nature. The alveolar liquids and are in free variation as in many African languages. The approximant is a voiced labial-velar.