Nobiin language

Nobiin is a Nubian language spoken along the banks of the Nile river in southern Egypt and northern Sudan by approximately 495 000 people. It is one of the Northern Nubian languages, ultimately of the Nilo-Saharan phylum. Many Nobiin speaking Nubians were forced to relocate in 1963–1964 due to the construction of the Aswan High Dam at Aswan, Egypt, to make room for Lake Nasser.

Nubian peoples have come to the Nile Valley from the southwest, were other Nubian languages are still spoken, at least 2500 years ago. Old Nubian, the language of the Nubian kingdoms, is considered ancestral to Nobiin. All present-day Nobiin speakers are bilingual in Arabic. Nobiin is a tonal language with contrastive vowel and consonant length. The basic word order is Subject Object Verb.

Geography and demography

Before the construction of the Aswan dam, speakers of Nobiin lived in the Nile valley between the third cataract in the South and Korosko in the North. Nowadays, Nobiin speakers live in the following areas: (1) near Kom Ombo, Egypt, about 40 km north of Aswan, where new housing was provided by the Egyptian government for approximately 50,000 Nubians; (2) in New Halfa in the Kassala state of Sudan, where housing and work was provided by the Sudanian government for Nubians from the inundated areas around Wadi Halfa; (3) in the Northern state of Sudan, northwards from Burgeg to the Egyptian border at Wadi Halfa. Additionally, many Nubians have moved to large cities like Cairo and Khartoum. In recent years, some of the resettled Nubians have returned to their traditional territories around Abu Simbel and Wadi Halfa.

Practically all speakers of Nobiin are bilingual in Arabic. This was noted as early as 1819 by the traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in his Travels to Nubia. In response to concerns about a possible language shift to Arabic, Werner notes a very positive language attitude^[1]. Similarly, the 15th edition of the Ethnologue notes that "[t]he language is the center of Nubian identity"^[2]. However, use of Nobiin is confined mainly to the domestic circle, as Arabic is the dominant language in trade, education, and public life.

Nobiin has been called Mahas, Mahas-Fiadidja, and Fiadicca in the past. Mahas and Fiadidja are geographical terms corresponding to alleged dialectal variants of Nobiin; Roland Werner has argued, based on Bell (1974) that in fact there is no evidence for the distinctness of the two (cf Werner p. 18—24). Nobiin should not be confused with the Arabic-based creole Ki-Nubi.

History

Nobiin is one of the few African languages having a written history that can be followed over the course of more than a millenium. Old Nubian, preserved in a sizable collection of mainly early Christian manuscripts and documented in detail by Gerald M. Browne (1944–2004), is considered ancestral to Nobiin. Many manuscripts have been unearthed in the Nile Valley, mainly between the first and fifth cataracts, testifying to a firm Nubian presence in the area during the first millenium. A dialect cluster closely related to Nobiin, Kenzi-Dongolawi, is found in the same area. The Nile-Nubian languages were the languages of the Nubian kingdoms.

The other Nubian languages are found hundreds of kilometres to the Southwest, in Darfur and in the Nuba Mountains of Kordofan. In the past, there has been much debate as to whether the Nubian languages spread to the Nile valley from Kordofan and Darfur or moved in the opposite direction. As the Nile-Nubian languages traditionally attracted the most attention, for a long time it was assumed that the Nubian peoples spread from the Nile Valley to the south, probably at the time of the downfall of the Christian kingdoms. However, comparative lexicostatistic research in the second half of the twentieth century has shown that the spread must have been in the opposite direction (Thelwall 1982, Adams 1982, among others). Greenberg (as cited in Thelwall 1982) calculated that a split between Hill Nubian and the Nile-Nubian languages occured at least 2,500 years ago. This account is corroborated by non-linguistic evidence — for example, the oral tradition of the Shaiqiya tribe of the Jaali group of arabized Nile-Nubians tells of coming from the southwest long ago.

Since the seventh century Nobiin has been challenged by Arabic. The economic and cultural influence of Egypt over the region was considerable and over the centuries the Arabic language spread south and areas like al-Maris became almost fully Arabized. The conversion of Nubia to Islam after the fall of the Christian kingdoms further enhanced the Arabization process. In what is today Sudan Arabic became the main language of the Kingdom of Sennar, with Nobiin becoming a minority tongue. In Egypt the Nobiin speakers were also part of largely Arab state, but Egyptian control over the south was limited. With the Ottoman conquest of the region in the sixteenth century official support for Arabization largely ended as the Turkish and Circassian governments in Cairo sometimes saw the non-Arab Nobiin speakers as a useful ally.

Sounds

Vowels

Nobiin has a five vowel system. Vowels can be long or short, e.g. jáákí 'fear' (long /a/), jàkkàr 'fish-hook' (short /a/). However, many nouns are unstable with regard to vowel length; thus, bálé : báléé ‘feast’, ííg : íg ‘fire’, shártí : sháártí ‘spear’.

Consonants

In the table below, orthographic symbols are included between brackets if they differ from the IPA symbols. Note especially the use of ‘y’ for IPA [j], common in African orthographies. Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a voiced consonant.

The phoneme /p/ has a somewhat marginal status as it only occurs as a result of certain morphophonological processes. /b/ is mainly in contrast with /f/. The alveolar liquids /l/ and /r/ are in free variation as in many African languages. Consonant length is contrastive, e.g. dáwwí 'path' vs. dáwí 'kitchen'. However, long consonants tend to be shortened in many cases (e.g. the Arabic loan dùkkáán ‘shop’ is often found as dùkáán).

Stress and tone

Early analyses

For a long time, the Nile Nubian languages were thought to be non-tonal; instead, early analyses employed term like 'stress' or 'accent' to describe the phenomena now recognized as a tone system ^[3]. In the early twentieth century, several authors started to perceive tone as a relevant phenomenon in Nubian languages, sometimes using 'tone' and 'accent' as synonyms. However, Carl Meinhof, an African linguist of considerable stature and well aware of tone in the 'Sudansprachen' at the time he conducted research on the Nile Nubian languages, reported that only remants of a tone system could be found in the Nubian languages. He based this conclusion not only on his own data, but also on the observation that Old Nubian had been written without tonal marking. Based on accounts like Meinhof’s, Nobiin was considered a toneless language for the first half of the twentieth century. In 1933 for example, Westermann and Ward wrote in their influential Practical Phonetics that "Swahili and Nuba are good examples of languages which were probably once tone languages and which are said to have lost their tones"^[4].

The statements of de facto authorities like Meinhof, Westermann, and Ward heavily affected the next three decades of linguistic theorizing about suprasegmental phenomena in Nobiin. As late as 1968, Herman Bell was the first scholar to develop an account of tone in Nobiin. Although his analysis was still hampered by the occasional confusion of accent and tone, he is credited by Roland Werner as being the first to recognize that Nobiin is a genuine tonal language, and the first to lay down some elementary tonal rules. With regard to stress in Nobiin, Werner remarks that he did not perceive any accent phenomena and that he does not see any reason to tie the account of tone to anything of the sort^[5].

Modern view

Nobiin is a tonal language, in which tone is used to mark lexical contrasts. Tone also figures heavily in derivational morphology. Nobiin has two underlying tones, high and low. A falling tone occurs in certain contexts; this tone can in general be analysed arising from a high and a low tone together.

• árré 'settlement' (high)
• nùùr 'shadow' (low)

In Nobiin, every utterance ends in a low tone. This is one of the clearest signs of the occurrence of a boundary tone, realized as a low tone on the last syllable of any prepausal word. The examples below show how the surface tone of the high tone verb ókkír- ‘cook’ depends on the position of the verb. In the first sentence, the verb is not final (because the question marker –náà is appended) and thus it is realized as high. In the second sentence, the verb is in utterance final position, resulting in a low tone on the last syllable.

• íttírkà ókkéénáà?   (vegetables:DO cook:she.PRESENT-Q)   'Does she cook the vegetables?'
• èyyò íttírkà ókkè.   (yes vegetables:DO cook:she.PRESENT)   'Yes, she cooks the vegetables.'

Tone plays an important role in several derivational processes. The most common situation involves the loss of the original tone pattern of the derivational base and the subsequent assignment of low tone, along with the affixation of a morpheme or word bringing its own tonal pattern (see below for examples).

Nowadays, Old Nubian is seen as a tonal language just like its descendant Nobiin. Browne (2002:23) writes that the Nobiin minimal pairs ín 'your (sg.)' vs. ìn 'this' and úr 'your (pl.)' vs. ùr 'head' appear in Old Nubian as en and our respectively. Obviously, the Nubians had a way to distinguish these forms even though they were written the same, leading him to conclude that "[Old Nubian] probably followed the tone system observable in modern Nobiin".

Morphology

Nobiin has open and closed syllables: ág ‘mouth’, één ‘woman’, gíí ‘uncle’, kám ‘camel’, díís ‘blood’. Every syllable bears a tone. Long consonants are only found in intervocalic position, whereas long vowels can occur in initial, medial and final position.

Pronouns

The basic personal pronouns of Nobiin are:

• ày- "I"
• ìr- "you (singular)"
• tàr- "he, she, it"
• ùù- "we"
• úr- "you (plural)"
• tér- "they"

There are three sets of possessive pronouns. One of them is transparently derived from the set of personal pronouns plus a connexive suffix –íín. Another set is less clearly related to the simple personal pronouns; all possessive pronouns of this set bear a High tone. The third set is derived from the second set by appending the nominalizing suffix -ní. The three sets are listed below.

• àyíín   án   ànní   — 'my'
• ìríín   ín   ìnní   — 'your'
• tàríín   tán   tànní   — 'his/her'
• ùùíín   úún   ùùní   — 'our'
• úríín   únn   únní   — 'your (pl)'
• téríín   ténn   ténní   — 'their'

Nobiin has two demonstrative pronouns: ìn 'this', denoting things nearby, and mán 'that', denoting things farther away. Both can function as the subject or the object in a sentence; in the latter case they take the object marker -gá yielding ìngà and mángá, respectively (for the object marker, see also below). The demonstrative pronoun always precedes the nouns it refers to.

• ìn íd dìrbád wèèkà kúnkènò   (this man hen one-OB have:3.sgPRESENT)   'This man has a hen.'
• mám búrúú nàày lè?   (that girl who be.Q)   'Who is that girl?'

Nouns

Nouns in Nobiin are predominantly disyllabic, although monosyllabic and three- or four-syllabic nouns are also found. Nouns can be derived from adjectives, verbs, or other nouns by appending various suffixes. In plural formation, the tone of a noun becomes Low and one of four plural markers is suffixed. Two fo these are Low in tone, while the other two have a High tone.

• -ìì (L): féntí → fèntìì '(sweet) dates'
• -ncìì (L): àrréé → àrèèncìì 'falls'
• -ríí (H): áádèm → ààdèmríí 'men, people'
• -gúú (H): kúrsí → kùrsìgúú 'chairs'

In most cases it is not predictable which plural suffix a noun will take. Furthermore, many nouns can take different suffixes, e.g. ág 'mouth' → àgìì/àgríí. However, nouns that have final -éé usually take Plural 2 (-ncìì), whereas disyllabic Low-High nouns typically take Plural 1 (-ìì).

Gender is expressed lexically, occasionally by use of a suffix, but more often with a different noun altogether, or, in the case of animals, by use of a separate nominal element óndí ‘masculine’ or kàrréé ‘feminine’:

• íd ‘man’ vs. ìdéén ‘woman’
• tòòd ‘boy’ vs. búrú ‘girl’
• kàjkàrréé ‘she-ass’ vs. kàjnóndí ‘donkey’

The pair male slave/female slave forms an interesting exception, showing gender marking through different endings of the lexeme: òsshí 'slave (m)' vs. òsshá 'slave (f)'. An Old Nubian equivalent which does not seem to show the gender is oshonaeigou 'slaves'; the plural suffix -gou has a modern equivalent in -gúú (see above).

In compound nouns comprised of two nouns, the tone of the first noun becomes Low while the appended noun keeps its own tonal pattern.

• kàdíís 'cat' + mórrí 'wild' → kàdììs-mórrí 'wild cat'
• ìkìríí 'guest' + nóóg 'house' → ìskìrììn-nóóg 'guest room'
• tògój 'sling' + kìd 'stone' → tògòj-kìd 'sling stone'

Many compounds are found in two forms, one more lexicalized than the other. Thus, it is common to find both the coordinated noun phrase háhám ámán 'the water of the river' and the compound noun bàhàm-ámán 'river-water', distinguished by their tonal pattern.

Verbs

Verbal morphology in Nobiin is subject to numerous morphophonological processes, including syllable contraction, vowel elision, and assimilation of all sorts and directions. A distinction needs to be made between the verbal base and the morphemes that follow. The majority of verbal bases in Nobiin end in a consonant (e.g. nèèr- ‘sleep’, kàb- ‘eat’, tíg- ‘follow’, fìyyí- ‘lie’); notable exceptions are júú- ‘go’ and níí- ‘drink’. Verbal bases are mono- or disyllabic. The verbal base carries one of three or four tonal patterns. The main verb carries person, number, tense, and aspect information.

• ày féjírkà sàllìr   (I morning.prayer pray:I.PRESENT)   'I pray the morning prayer.'

Only rarely do verbal bases occur without appended morphemes. One such case is the use of the verb júú- 'go' in a serial verb-like construction.

• áríj wèèkà fà júú jáánìr   (meat one:OB FUTURE go buy:IPRESENT)   'I'm going to buy a piece of meat.'

Grammar

The basic word order in a Nobiin sentence is Subject Object Verb. Objects are marked by an object suffix -gá, often assimilating to the final consonant of the word (e.g. kìtááb 'book', kìtááppá 'book-OBJECT' as seen below). In a sentence containing both an indirect and a direct object, the object marker is suffixed to both.

• kám íwgà kàbì   (camel corn-OB eat:he.PRESENT)   'The camel eats corn.'
• ày ìkkà ìn kìtááppá tèèr   (I you-OB this book-OB give:I.PRESENT)   'I give you this book.'

Questions

Questions can be constructed in various ways in Nobiin. Constituent questions ('Type 1', questions about 'who?', 'what?', etc.) are formed by use of a set of verbal suffixes in conjunction with question words. Simple interrogative utterances ('Type 2') are formed by use of another set of verbal suffixes.

Some of the suffixes are similar. Possible ambiguities are solved by the context in which the question is asked. Some examples (question words and question markers are underlined):

• mìn ámán túúl áányì?   (what water in live:PRES.2/3SG.Q1)   'What lives in water?'
• híddó nííl mìrì?   (where Nile run/flow:PRES.2/3SG.Q1)   'Where does the Nile flow?'
• ìr sààbúúngà jáánnáà?   (you soap:OB have:2/3SG.PRES.Q2)   'Do you have soap?'
• sàbúúngà jáánnáà?   (soap:OB have:PRES2/3SG.Q2)   'do you sell soap?' / 'Does he/she sell soap?'
• úr báléél árágróò?   (you (pl.) party.at dance:PRES1/2PL.Q2)   'Do you (pl.) dance at the party?'

Notes and references

Notes

1. ^  Werner 1987:31: "Zwar ist fast jeder nubische Mann zweisprachig, und durch die Schule dringt das Arabische immer weiter vor, doch konnte nie der 'Verlust der Sprachkompetenz' beobachted werden." [It is true that almost every Nubian man is bilingual, and that Arabic is pervading through education — but a 'loss of competence' was never observed.]
2. ^  Cf. Ethnologue report on Nobiin.
3. ^  The Egyptologist Lepsius spoke in 1880 of the Wohlklang of the Nubian language, and related this to the vowel distribution and the balance between long and short consonants.
4. ^  Westermann, Diedrich Hermann & Ward, Ida (1933) Practical Phonetics for Students of African Languages, p. 139.
5. ^  Werner 1987:77.

References

• Adams, W.Y. (1982) 'The coming of Nubian speakers to the Nile Valley', in Ehret, C. & Posnansky, M. (eds.) The Archeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History. Berkeley/Los Angeles, 11–38.
• Bell, H. (1974) 'Dialect in Nobíin Nubian'. In Abd el-Gadir Mohmoud Abdalla (ed.) Studies in Ancient Languages of the Sudan. Khartoum. 109—122.
• Burckhardt, Johann Ludwig (or John Lewis) (1819) Travels in Nubia. London.
• Thelwall, Robin (1978) 'Lexicostatistical relations between Nubian, Daju and Dinka', Études nubiennes: colloque de Chantilly, 2–6 juillet 1975, 265—286.
• Thelwall, Robin (1982) 'Linguistic Aspects of Greater Nubian History', in Ehret, C. & Posnansky, M. (eds.) The Archeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History. Berkeley/Los Angeles, 39–56. online version
• Werner, Roland (1987) Grammatik des Nobiin (Nilnubisch) (Nilo-Saharan Studies vol. 1). Hambürg: Helmut Buske Verlag. ISBN 0932–1993

External link

• Ethnologue report on Nobiin