Nobiin language

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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]

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.