13 Facts About Nobiin language

Nobiin language is currently spoken along the banks of the Nile in Upper Egypt and northern Sudan by approximately 610,000 Nubians.

Present-day Nobiin language speakers are almost universally multilingual in local varieties of Arabic, generally speaking Modern Standard Arabic as well as Sa?idi Arabic or Sudanese Arabic.

Practically all speakers of Nobiin language are bilingual in Egyptian Arabic or Sudanese Arabic.

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.

Nobiin language has been called Mahas, Mahas-Fiadidja, and Fiadicca in the past.

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The speakers of Nobiin are thought to have come to the area before the speakers of the related Kenzi-Dongolawi languages.

In Egypt, the Nobiin language speakers were part of a largely Arabic-speaking state, but Egyptian control over the south was limited.

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.

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.

Nobiin language 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.

Nobiin language based this conclusion not only on his own data, but on the observation that Old Nubian had been written without tonal marking.

Nouns in Nobiin language are predominantly disyllabic, although monosyllabic and three- or four-syllabic nouns are found.

Verbal morphology in Nobiin language is subject to numerous morphophonological processes, including syllable contraction, vowel elision, and assimilation of all sorts and directions.