Nubian languages
| Nubian | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution: |
Sudan, Egypt |
| Linguistic classification: |
Nilo-Saharan?
|
| Subdivisions: | |
| ISO 639-2 / 5: | |
| Glottolog: | nubi1251 |
The Nubian languages (Arabic: لغات نوبية) are the indigenous languages of Nubia, along the Nile in southern Egypt and northern Sudan. In the 1973 Arab–Israeli War Egypt employed Nubian-speaking Nubian people as codetalkers.
Bechhaus-Gerst (1996) finds the following varieties:
An additional language, Haraza, is known only from a few dozen words recalled by village elders in 1923.
Old Nubian is preserved in at least a hundred pages of documents, mostly of a Christian religious nature, written with an uncial variety of the Greek alphabet, extended with three Coptic letters and three unique to Old Nubian, apparently 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.
Synchronic research on the Nubian languages began in the last decades of the nineteenth century, first focusing on the Nile Nubian languages Nobiin and Dongolawi/Kenzi. Several well-known Africanists have occupied themselves with Nubian, most notably Lepsius (1880), Reinisch (1879), and Meinhof (1918); other early Nubian scholars include Almkvist and Schäfer. Additionally, important comparative work on the Nubian languages has been carried out by Thelwall and Bechhaus-Gerst in the second half of the twentieth century.
There are three currently active proposals for a Nubian alphabet: based on the Arabic script, the Latin script, and the Old Nubian alphabet. Since the 1950s, Latin has been used by four authors, Arabic by two, and Old Nubian by one, in the publication of various books of proverbs, dictionaries, and textbooks. For Arabic, the extended ISESCO system may be used to indicate vowels and consonants not found in the Arabic alphabet itself.
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