Nubian language of northern Sudan and southern Egypt
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Nobiin language" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR(June 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
Nobiin
Halfawi, Mahas
Nòbíín
Native to
Egypt, Sudan
Region
Along the banks of the Nile in southern Egypt and northern Sudan
Ethnicity
Nubian
Native speakers
680,000 (2023)[1]
Language family
Nilo-Saharan?
Eastern Sudanic
Northern Eastern
Nubian
Northern
Nobiin
Early form
Old Nubian
Writing system
Coptic script (Old Nubian variant) Latin alphabet Arabic alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3
fia
Glottolog
nobi1240
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.
Nobiin, also known as Halfawi, Mahas, is a Northern 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.
^Nobiin at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024)
^Nubian Language Society[permanent dead link]
^"Nobiin". Ethnologue. Retrieved 26 September 2023.
^"Nubians demand repatriation during Sisi visit". Al-Monitor. Retrieved 7 January 2022.
Nobiin, also known as Halfawi, Mahas, is a Northern Nubian language of the Nilo-Saharan language family. "Nobiin" is the genitive form of Nòòbíí ("Nubian")...
distinguishes the following Nubian languages, spoken by in total about 900,000 speakers: Nobiin, is the second largest Nubian language with 545,000 speakers in...
Afro-Asiatic influence on Nobiin, and considers evidence of substratal influence on Nobiin from an earlier now extinct Eastern Sudanic language to be stronger....
the letter ج, and it also exhibits characteristics of the ancient Nobiinlanguage that once covered the region. Accordingly, linguists have identified...
present-day southern Egypt and northern Sudan spoke Berber languages. The Nilo-Saharan Nobiinlanguage today contains a number of key loanwords related to pastoralism...
Nubian or Old Nobiin) is an extinct Nubian language, attested in writing from the 8th to the 15th century AD. It is ancestral to modern-day Nobiin and closely...
Nubians (/ˈnuːbiənz, ˈnjuː-/) (Nobiin: Nobī, Arabic: النوبيون) are a Nilo-Saharan ethnic group indigenous to the region which is now Northern Sudan and...
Nubia Nubia (/ˈnjuːbiə/) (Nobiin: Nobīn, Arabic: النُوبَة, romanized: an-Nūba) is a region along the Nile river encompassing the area between the first...
Afro-Asiatic influence on Nobiin, and considers evidence of substratal influence on Nobiin from an earlier now extinct Eastern Sudanic language to be stronger....
Nubian languages Dongolawi language or Andaandi language of Nubia, in the Nile Vale of northern Sudan Nobiinlanguage, the largest Nubian language (previously...
into Norwegian Nubian (Nobiin): Bible translations into Nubian Mijikenda (formerly "Nyika"): Bible translations into the languages of Africa § Mijikenda/Nyika...
languages are Kanuri, Fur, Songhay, Nobiin and the widespread Nilotic family, which includes the Luo, Dinka and Maasai. Most Nilo-Saharan languages are...
Afro-Asiatic languages and dissimilar from those of the Nilo-Saharan languages. Claude Rilly proposes that Meroitic, like the Nobiinlanguage, belongs to...
controller on Pandora and PlayStation Portable ISO 639-2 code for the Nobiinlanguage of Nubia Northern University, Bangladesh National University, Bangladesh...
(27th ed., 2024) Bechhaus-Gerst, Marianne. The (Hi)story of Nobiin — 1000 Years of Language Change. Peter Lang, 2011, p. 22. Massenbach, Gertrud von. Nubische...
consisting of Nobiin, and Western (Darfur), consisting of Midob. They are grouped together with Kenzi-Dongolawi (not seen to be closely related to Nobiin, despite...
languages, mainly Nobiin, but also Kenuzi. About 30,000 Egyptian Berbers living in the Siwa oasis and its surroundings speak Siwi language, which is a variety...
Masai) or Maa (English: /ˈmɑːsaɪ/; autonym: ɔl Maa) is an Eastern Nilotic language spoken in Southern Kenya and Northern Tanzania by the Maasai people, numbering...
The Nubi language (also called Ki-Nubi, Arabic: كي-نوبي, romanized: kī-nūbī) is a Sudanese Arabic-based creole language spoken in Uganda around Bombo,...
The Gospel of Mark in the Fiadidja dialect of Nubian also called the Nobiinlanguage. Published in Berlin in 1860. Then edited by Leo Reinisch, and republished...
III, pp. 99–227. Bechhaus-Gerst, Marianne. The (Hi)story of Nobiin — 1000 Years of Language Change. Peter Lang, 2011, p. 22. Abdel-Hafiz, Ahmed Sokarno...
unified written grammar of Dinka. The language most closely related to Dinka is the Nuer language. The Luo languages are also closely related. The Dinka...
standard written form in all three kingdoms. Of the living Nubian languages, it is modern Nobiin which is the closest to Old Nubian and probably its direct descendant...
(Sabiny), or Sebei, is a Kalenjin language a Southern Nilotic language of eastern Uganda. Kupsabiny and a dozen other languages form the Southern Nilotic branch...
languages to encourage literacy in the Nubian alphabet, for which he wrote and published Nabra's Nubian Numbers, a children's book written in Nobiin and...
Bari is the Nilotic language of the Karo people, spoken over large areas of Central Equatoria state in South Sudan, across the northwest corner of Uganda...
Nilotic languages are one of the three primary branches of the Nilotic languages, along with the Eastern Nilotic languages and Southern Nilotic languages; Themselves...
Nyolge or Nyagulgule (Njalgulgule) is a Daju language of the Western Daju, spoken in a single village in South Sudan. Nyolge at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)...
Global Information
