Nobiin language

Nobiin, or Mahas, is a Northern Nubian language of the Nilo-Saharan phylum. ‘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’.

At least 2,500 years ago, the first Nubian speakers migrated into the Nile Valley from the southwest. Old Nubian is thought to be ancestral to Nobiin, the latter of which 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 river in southern Egypt and northern Sudan by approximately 495,000 Nubians. Present-day Nobiin speakers are almost universally bilingual in local varieties of Arabic, generally speaking Standard Arabic (for official purposes) as well as Saidi 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 High Dam at Aswan, Egypt and for the upstream Lake Nasser.

There is no standardized orthography for Nobiin. It has been written in both Latinized 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.