NUBIAN LANGUAGES

group of languages spoken in Egypt and The Sudan, chiefly along the banks of the Nile River between the first and fourth cataracts (Nile Nubian), but also spoken in enclaves in the Nuba Hills of western Sudan (Hill Nubian). Hill Nubian is composed of Midobi and Birked, which are not closely related. Some scholars divide Nile Nubian into three groups, each containing one language (Northern, or Kenuzi; Central, or Mahas; and Southern, or Dongola), while others group Northern and Southern Nubian together. Although many scholars formerly classified the Nubian languages as Hamitic or as Sudanese-Guinean, most now place the Nubian languages in the Eastern Sudanic subbranch of the Chari-Nile branch of the Nilo-Saharan language family. The Nubian languages make much more use of suffixes than of prefixes or infixes, especially in noun inflection. Nouns have forms for the nominative, vocative, objective, genitive, locative, instrumental, and ablative cases in some of the languages. A collective noun used as the subject of a sentence may be followed by either a singular or a plural verb. Documents in Old Nubian, which appears to be the ancestor of modern Central Nubian, date from the end of the 8th century to the beginning of the 14th century. These are usually translations of Christian writings originally in Greek and are written, as is modern Nubian, in an adaptation of the Coptic alphabet. Speakers of Nubian languages in modern times are Muslims, and the languages contain a number of Arabic borrowings.