Nobiin

Nobiin is the Nile Nubian language of the Nubians of northern Sudan and the far south of Egypt, spoken along the river between Aswan and the Kerma basin. It is the direct modern continuation of Old Nubian, the Christian-era literary language of Nubia written in a Coptic-derived alphabet from the eighth century onwards, giving the Nubian family one of Africa's deepest indigenous written records. Nobiin has a register tone system and contrastive vowel length that are both lexically distinctive — áy 'heart' against ày 'I' — and tone is marked in the forms given here where the sources record it. Much of the traditional speech area was flooded by the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s and the population was resettled at Kom Ombo in Egypt and New Halfa in Sudan, dispersing the community far from the Nile. Roughly 685,000 people still speak it, but Arabic dominates schooling and public life, and use of the Old Nubian alphabet survives mainly through revival efforts.

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