Nobiin is a Nile-language originally spoken along the Nile River in Egypt and Sudan. Rilly & de Voogt (2012) estimate that today’s Nobiin community consists of about 545,000 members. Of those, about 500,000 are in Egypt and Sudan, and the rest live as refugees in Europe, the United States (U.S.), and the Arabian Gulf (Rilly & de Voogt, 2012) due to the coerced displacement of much of the Nobiin community in the 1960s. Nobiin is currently considered to be an endangered language. Several members of the Nobiin communities in the U.S. and elsewhere are currently engaged in revitalization programs, including literacy projects for native Nobiin-speaking adults and children of the Nobiin community.

Due to the High Dam’s construction near Aswan in the 1960s, large numbers of Nobiin speakers were coerced to move from their historical land in the Nile Valley in both Egypt and Sudan. Prior to this displacement, Nobiin was primarily spoken in the region beginning 180km south of the first cataract of the Nile in southern Egypt, and Kerma, in the north of Sudan. Map 1 shows areas in southern Egypt and Sudan in which Nobiin speakers have historically resided (from Thelwall & Schadeberg, 1983: 228).

In the last approximately 65 years, many Nobiin writing methods have come into being a response to the local community’s strong will to preserve its endangered language. In the 1990s, Dr. Mokhtar Khalil Kabbara, a Nubian professor who worked in the Department of Antiquities at Cairo University, began revitalizing the writing of the Nobiin language using the Old Nubian script (Mokhtar 1996:8). His orthography remains popular among many Nubians in Egypt and Sudan. Motivated by the work of Dr. Kabbara, the Nubian Language Society (NLS) developed a phonemic orthography known as ‘nobiin agii’- which literally means “Nobiin letters,” to write Nobiin based on the Old Nubian script. Nobiin agii is an uncial script that employs the use of one-size characters. The primary function of nobiin agii is to represent the Nobiin phonemic inventory. This script includes twenty-four letters: seventeen represent consonants, five represent vowels, and two represent semivowels. The nobiin agii alphabet is currently being taught and learned by members of the Nobiin diaspora communities in Washington, D.C., Virginia, Maryland, and Philadelphia. The table below lists all the letters contained in the orthography.

A sample text written in Nobiin agii appears below. Note that the macrons over vowel graphemes are used to denote that the vowel is phonologically long.

Sonnet 18 by The above example text is extracted from the Nobiin translation of Shakespeare’s Nubantood Khalil (Khalil, 2017). The interlined transliteration

according to IPA and interpretation of the text (word-by-word) is shown below as follows:

Source: Nubantood Khalil and Maya L. Barzilai. 2020. Nobiin (Egypt, Sudan) – Language Snapshot. Language Documentation and Description 17. 118-125.