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Concept
Nubian languages
Summary
The Nubian languages (lughāt nūbiyyah) are a group of related languages spoken by the Nubians. In the past, 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. Nubian is not to be confused with the various Nuba languages spoken in villages in the Nuba mountains and Darfur.
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 been losing support among linguists due to a lack of supporting data.
Old Nubian is preserved in at least a hundred pages of documents, comprising both texts of a Christian 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. 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, the capital of Alodia. Since their publication by Adolf Ermann in 1881, they have been referred to as 'Alwan inscriptions' or 'Alwan Nubian.'
A reconstruction of Proto-Nubian has been proposed by Claude Rilly (2010: 272-273).
Rilly (2010) 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 Egypt, Sudan, and the Nubian diaspora. Previously known by the geographic terms Mahas and Fadicca/Fiadicca. As late as 1863 this language, or a closely related dialect, was known to have been spoken by the arabized Nubian Shaigiya tribe.
Kenzi (endonym: Mattokki) with 850,000 speakers in Egypt and Dongolawi (endonym: Andaandi) with 180,000 speakers in Sudan.
Official source
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