{{Infobox Language
|name=Nobiin
|nativename=Nòbíín
|states=Egypt, Sudan
|region=Along the banks of the Nile in southern Egypt and northern Sudan
|speakers=495,000 (SIL 2005)
|familycolor=Nilo-Saharan
|fam2=Eastern Sudanic
|fam3=Nubian
|fam4=Northern
|iso2=nub|iso3=fia}}

'''Nobiin''' 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".

Nubian peoples immigrated into the Nile Valley from the southwest, where other Nubian languages are still spoken, at least 2,500 years ago, and Old Nubian, the language of the Nubian kingdoms, is considered ancestral to Nobiin. Nobiin 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 Arabic - Egyptian and Sudanese. 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 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''.

==Geography and demography==
Before the construction of the Kassala state of Sudan, where housing and work was provided by the Sudanese government for Nubians from the inundated areas around 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.
220px|right|thumb|Before the construction of the [[Aswan Dam, the Nobiin people lived mainly between the first and the third cataracts along the shores of the Nile. Yellow dots show places where communities of Nobiin speakers are found today.]]

Practically all speakers of Nobiin are bilingual in Egyptian Arabic or Sudanese Arabic. For the men, this was noted as early as 1819 by the traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in his ''Travels to Nubia''. The forced resettlement in the second half of the twentieth century also brought more Nubians, especially women and children, into daily contact with Arabic. Chief factors in this development include increased mobility (and hence easy access to non-Nubian villages and cities), changes in social patterns such as women going more often to the market to sell their own products, and easy access to Arabic newspapers.<ref>Rouchdy 1992a:93.</ref> In urban areas, many Nubian women go to school and are fluent in Arabic; they usually address their children in Arabic, reserving Nobiin for their husband. In response to concerns about a possible language shift to Arabic, Werner notes a very positive language attitude.<ref name="attitude">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' beobachtet werden." [''It is true that almost every Nubian man is bilingual, and that Arabic is pervading through education &mdash; but a 'loss of competence' was never observed.'']</ref> Rouchdy (1992a) however notes that use of Nobiin is confined mainly to the domestic circle, as Arabic is the dominant language in trade, education, and public life. Sociolinguistically, the situation may be described as one of stable bilingualism: the dominant language (Arabic in this case), although used widely, does not easily replace the minority language since the latter is tightly connected to the Nubian identity.<ref>Rouchdy 1992a:95</ref> 

Nobiin has been called ''Mahas(i)'', ''Mahas-Fiadidja'', and ''Fiadicca'' in the past. Mahas and Fiadidja are geographical terms which correspond to two dialectal variants of Nobiin; the differences between these two dialects are negligible and some have in fact argued that there is no evidence of a dialectal distinction at all.<ref name="dialects">Werner (1987:18—24), see also Bell (1974).</ref> Nobiin should not be confused with the Arabic-based creole Ki-Nubi.

==History==
Nobiin is one of the few Old Nubian, preserved in a sizable collection of mainly early Christian manuscripts and documented in detail by Kenzi-Dongolawi, is found in the same area. The Nile-Nubian languages were the languages of the Christian Nubian kingdoms.

The other Greenberg (as cited in Thelwall 1982) calculated that a split between Hill Nubian and the two Nile-Nubian languages occurred at least 2,500 years ago. This is corroborated by the fact that the oral tradition of the Shaiqiya tribe of the Jaali group of arabized Nile-Nubians tells of coming from the southwest long ago. The speakers of Nobiin are thought to have come to the area before the speakers of the related Kenzi-Dongolawi languages (see classification below).

Since the seventh century, Nobiin has been challenged by Egyptian Dialect of Arabic spread south. Areas like al-Maris became almost fully Arabized. The conversion of Nubia to 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 Nobiin speakers as a useful ally. However, as Arabic remained a language of high importance in Sudan and especially Egypt, Nobiin continued to be under pressure and its use became largely confined to Nubian homes.

==Classification==
Nobiin is one of the about eleven Nubian languages. It has traditionally been grouped with the Kenzi-Dongolawi cluster, mainly based on the geographic proximity of the two (prior to the construction of the Aswan Dam, varieties of Kenzi-Dongolawi were spoken north and south of the Nobiin area, in Kunuz and Dongola respectively). The uniformity of this 'Nile-Nubian' branch was first called into doubt by Thelwall (1982) who argued, based on lexicostatistical evidence, that Nobiin must have split off from the other Nubian languages earlier than Kenzi-Dongolawi. In Thelwall's classification, Nobiin forms a 'Northern' branch on its own whereas Kenzi-Dongolawi is considered part of Central Nubian, along with Birged (north Darfur) and the Hill Nubian languages (Nuba Mountains, Kordofan province).

In recent times, research by Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst has shed more light on the relations between Nobiin and Kenzi-Dongolawi. The groups have been separated so long that they do not share a common identity; additionally, they differ in their traditions about their origins.<ref name="origins">In particular, the speakers of Nobiin claim to be the only real Nubians of African descent, whereas the Kenzi-Dongolawi believe they are descendants of Arabian immigrants (Bechhaus-Gerst 1996:298).</ref> The languages are clearly genetically related, but the picture is complicated by the fact that there are also indications of contact-induced change (Bechhaus-Gerst 1996). Nobiin appears to have had a strong influence on Kenzi-Dongolawi, as evidenced by similarities between the phoneme inventories as well as the occurrence of numerous borrowed grammatical morphemes. This has led some to suggest that Kenzi-Dongolawi in fact is "a 'hybrid' language between old Nobiin and pre-contact Dongolawi" (Heine & Kuteva 2001:400). Evidence of the reverse influence is much rarer, although there are some late loans in Nobiin which are thought to come from Kenzi-Dongolawi (Bechhaus-Gerst 1996:306).

The Nubian languages are part of the Eastern Sudanic branch of Taman group, with an average lexical similarity of just 22.2 per cent.

==Sounds==
Nobiin has open and closed Phonotactically, there might be a weak relationship between the occurrence of consonant and vowel length: forms like ''dàrrìl'' 'climb' and ''dààrìl'' 'be present' are found, but ''*dàrìl'' (short V + short C) and ''*dààrrìl'' (long V + long C) do not exist; similarly, ''féyyìr'' 'grow' and ''fééyìr'' 'lose (a battle)' occur, but not ''*féyìr'' and ''*fééyyìr''.

===Vowels===
Nobiin has a five close or more open (as  and , respectively). Vowels can be long or short, e.g. ''jáákí'' 'fear' (long ), ''jàkkàr'' 'fish-hook' (short ). However, many nouns are unstable with regard to vowel length; thus, ''bálé'' : ''báléé'' ‘feast’, ''ííg'' : ''íg'' ‘fire’, ''shártí'' : ''sháártí'' ‘spear’. Diphthongs are interpreted as sequences of vowels and the glides  and .

{|class="wikitable"
! Monophthongs
! Front
! Central
! Back
|-
| '''Close'''
| align=center | 
| &nbsp;
| align=center | 
|-
| '''Close-mid'''
| align=center | 
| &nbsp;
| align=center | 
|-
| '''Open'''
| &nbsp;
| align=center | 
| &nbsp;
|}

===Consonants=== 
Consonant length is contrastive in Nobiin, e.g. ''dáwwí'' 'path' vs. ''dáwí'' 'kitchen'. Like vowel length, consonant length is not very stable; long consonants tend to be shortened in many cases (e.g. the Arabic loan ''dùkkáán'' ‘shop’ is often found as ''dùkáán'').

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"
|+'''Consonant phonemes'''
|-
!| &nbsp;
! colspan="2" | Bilabial
! colspan="2" | Labio-<br>dental
! colspan="2" | Alveolar
! colspan="2" | Palatal
! colspan="2" | Velar
! Glottal
|-
!| Plosives and<br/>affricates 
| style="border-right-width: 0;" |  || style="border-left-width: 0;" | 
| style="border-right-width: 0;" | &nbsp; || style="border-left-width: 0;" | &nbsp;
| style="border-right-width: 0;" |  || style="border-left-width: 0;" | 
| style="border-right-width: 0;" |  || style="border-left-width: 0;" | 
| style="border-right-width: 0;" |  || style="border-left-width: 0;" | 
| &nbsp;
|-
!| Nasals
| style="border-right-width: 0;" | &nbsp; || style="border-left-width: 0;" | 
| style="border-right-width: 0;" | &nbsp; || style="border-left-width: 0;" | &nbsp;
| style="border-right-width: 0;" | &nbsp; || style="border-left-width: 0;" | 
| style="border-right-width: 0;" | &nbsp; || style="border-left-width: 0;" | 
| style="border-right-width: 0;" | &nbsp; || style="border-left-width: 0;" | 
| &nbsp;
|-
!| Fricatives 
| style="border-right-width: 0;" | &nbsp; || style="border-left-width: 0;" | &nbsp;
| style="border-right-width: 0;" |  || style="border-left-width: 0;" | &nbsp;
| style="border-right-width: 0;" |  || style="border-left-width: 0;" | 
| style="border-right-width: 0;" |  || style="border-left-width: 0;" | &nbsp;
| style="border-right-width: 0;" | &nbsp; || style="border-left-width: 0;" | &nbsp;
| (h)
|-
!| Trill
| style="border-right-width: 0;" | &nbsp; || style="border-left-width: 0;" | &nbsp;
| style="border-right-width: 0;" | &nbsp; || style="border-left-width: 0;" | &nbsp;
| style="border-right-width: 0;" | &nbsp; || style="border-left-width: 0;" | 
| style="border-right-width: 0;" | &nbsp; || style="border-left-width: 0;" | &nbsp;
| style="border-right-width: 0;" | &nbsp; || style="border-left-width: 0;" | &nbsp;
| &nbsp;
|-
!| Approximants
| style="border-right-width: 0;" | &nbsp; || style="border-left-width: 0;" | &nbsp;
| style="border-right-width: 0;" | &nbsp; || style="border-left-width: 0;" | &nbsp;
| style="border-right-width: 0;" | &nbsp; || style="border-left-width: 0;" | 
| style="border-right-width: 0;" | &nbsp; || style="border-left-width: 0;" | j
| style="border-right-width: 0;" | &nbsp; || style="border-left-width: 0;" | w
| &nbsp;
|}

The phoneme /p/ has a somewhat marginal status as it only occurs as a result of certain morphophonological processes. The voiced plosive /b/ is mainly in contrast with /f/. Originally, [z] only occurred as an onomatopoeic nature. The alveolar liquids /l/ and /r/ are in free variation as in many African languages. The approximant /w/ is a voiced labial-velar.

===Tone===
Nobiin is a 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 at the end of the utterance, resulting in a low tone on the last syllable.

*íttírkà ókkéénáà? &nbsp; (vegetables:<small>DO</small> cook:she.<small>PRESENT</small>-Q) &nbsp; 'Does she cook the vegetables?'
*èyyò íttírkà ókkè. &nbsp; (yes vegetables:<small>DO</small> cook:she.<small>PRESENT</small>) &nbsp; '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).

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 .<ref name="lepsius">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.</ref> 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" (p. 139).</ref> The statements of ''de facto'' authorities like Meinhof, Westermann, and Ward heavily affected the next three decades of linguistic theorizing about stress and tone 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.<ref name="ton">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. From the fact that the Nubians must have had a way to distinguish these forms even though they were written the same, he draws the conclusion that "[Old Nubian] probably followed the tone system observable in modern Nobiin".</ref>

==Grammar==
200px|right|thumb|A [[Nubian wedding near Aswan, Egypt]]
===Pronouns===
The basic personal pronouns of Nobiin are:
{|
|
* ày- 
* ìr- 
* tàr- 
* ùù- 
* úr- 
* tér-
||
:''I''
:''you'' (singular)
:''he, she, it''
:''we''
:''you'' (plural)
:''they''
|}
<div style="float:right; clear:right">
{|style="margin:10px;padding:5px;width:210px;border:1px solid #CCCCCC"
| ''my'' || àyíín || án ||ànní
|-
| ''your'' || ìríín || ín || ìnní 
|-
| ''his/her'' || tàríín || tán || tànní 
|-
| ''our'' || ùùíín || úún || ùùní 
|-
| ''your'' || úríín || únn || únní
|-
| ''their'' || téríín || ténn || ténní 
|}
</div>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''.

Nobiin has two below). The demonstrative pronoun always precedes the nouns it refers to.

{{Infobox Langue|nom=Nobiin|nomnatif=Nobiin
|couleurfamille=gold
|couleurfond=#FEF3B6
|pays=Égypte, Soudan
|région=Le long du Nil
|locuteurs=495&nbsp;000 (SIL 2005)
|rang= inconnu
|famille=
|langueofficielle=Aucun
|académie=Aucune
|iso1=n.a.
|iso2=n.a. (nub)
|iso3=
|sil=FIA
|échantillon=}}

==Introduction==

Le '''Nobiin''' ou '''nubien''' est une langue nubienne parlée le long du Nil au sud de l'Égypte et au nord du Soudan par environ 495&nbsp;000 personnes.

Le Nobiin descent directement de l'ancien nubien, une langue parlée, écrite jusqu'au XVe siècle. Les locuteurs du Nobiin sont aujourd'hui tous bilingues et parlent couramment l'arabe.

Le Nobiin est une langue tonale, les tons sont notés en écriture latine avec les accents, possède des voyelles discriminantes et des consonnes de différentes longueurs. Les mots peuvent subir une élision ou une assimilation dans différentes directions. Les verbes peuvent être placés en série. La typologie de la langue est SOV.

==Phonétique==
===Voyelles===
Le Nobiin possède 5 voyelles, qui peuvent être courtes ou longues. On doublera les voyelles longues dans la transcription. Cependant, de nombreux noms ne tiennent pas compte de la longueur de la voyelle (''bálé'' / ''báléé'' "fête", ''ííg'' / ''íg'' "feu", ''shártí'' / ''sháártí'' "lance"...). 

{| class="wikitable"
|+ <small>Voyelles du Nobbin</small>
!<small>Werner 1987</small>!!Antérieur!!Central!!Postérieur
|-
|style="text-align: right;"|Fermé|| • || || • 
|-
|style="text-align: right;"|Mi-fermé|| • || || • 
|-
|style="text-align: right;"|Ouvert|| ||  •  ||
|}

===Consonnes=== 

{| class="wikitable"
|+
<small>Consonnes du Nobbin</small>
|----- style="background-color:#F7F7F7"
! scope="col" | <small>Werner 1987</small>
! scope="col" | <small>bilabiale</small>
! scope="col" | <small>labio-<br />dentale</small>
! scope="col" | <small>alveolaire</small>
! scope="col" | <small>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;palatal&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</small>
! scope="col" | <small>velaire</small>
! scope="col" | <small>glottale</small>
|-----
! scope="row" style="background-color:#F7F7F7" | <small>plosives</small>
|  ·  || &nbsp; ||  · 
| &nbsp; || &nbsp;·&nbsp;
| &nbsp;
|-----
! scope="row" style="background-color:#F7F7F7" | <small>fricatives</small>
| &nbsp; ||  || &nbsp; ||  || &nbsp;
| 
|-----
! scope="row" style="background-color:#F7F7F7" | <small>affriquées</small>
| &nbsp; || &nbsp; || &nbsp;
|  · 
| &nbsp; || &nbsp;
|-----
! scope="row" style="background-color:#F7F7F7" | <small>nasales</small>
|  || &nbsp; || 
|  ||  || &nbsp;
|-----
! scope="row" style="background-color:#F7F7F7" | <small>roulées</small>
| &nbsp; || &nbsp; ||  || &nbsp; || &nbsp;
| &nbsp;
|-----
! scope="row" style="background-color:#F7F7F7" | <small>approximantes</small>
|  || &nbsp; || 
|  || || &nbsp;
|}

==Grammaire==
===Pronoms===

'''Pronoms personnels :'''

* ày- "Je"
* ìr- "Tu"
* tàr- "Il, elle, ça"
* ùù- "Nous"
* úr- "Vous"
* tér- "Ils, elles"

'''Pronoms possesifs :'''

* àyíín &nbsp; án &nbsp; ànní &nbsp; — 'mon/ma/mes'
* ìríín &nbsp; ín &nbsp; ìnní &nbsp; — 'ton/ta/tes'
* tàríín &nbsp; tán &nbsp; tànní &nbsp; — 'son/sa/ses'
* ùùíín &nbsp; úún &nbsp; ùùní &nbsp; — 'notre/nos'
* úríín &nbsp; únn &nbsp; únní &nbsp; — 'votre/vos'
* téríín &nbsp; ténn &nbsp; ténní &nbsp; — 'leur/leurs'

'''Pronoms démonstratifs  :'''

*''ìn'' : 'ceci'
*''mán'' :  'cela'

===Noms===

Les noms en Nobiin sont pour la plupart composés de deux syllabes, mais il existe également des noms monosyllabiques ou beaucoup plus longs. Les noms peuvent être dérivés des adjectifs, des verbes, et d'autres noms en ajoutant différents suffixes. 