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Nobiin, or Mahas, 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". Another term used is ''Noban tamen'', meaning ‘the Nubian language’.〔(Nubian Language Society )〕 At least 2,500 years ago, the first Nubian speakers migrated into the Nile Valley from the southwest. Old Nubian is thought to be ancestral to Nobiin, the latter of which 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 Nile river in southern Egypt and northern Sudan by approximately 495,000 Nubians. Present-day Nobiin speakers are almost universally bilingual in local varieties of Arabic, generally speaking Standard Arabic (for official purposes) as well as Saidi Egyptian Arabic or Sudanese Arabic. 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 orthography for Nobiin. It has been written in both 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 Aswan dam, speakers of Nobiin lived in the Nile valley between the third cataract in the south and Korosko in the north. About 60% of the territory of Nubia was destroyed or rendered unfit for habitation as a result of the construction of the dam and the creation of Lake Nasser. At least half of the Nubian population was forcibly resettled.〔Rouchdy 1992b:92, citing Adams 1977.〕 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 Sudanese 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 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.〔Rouchdy 1992a:93.〕 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.〔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." (is true that almost every Nubian man is bilingual, and that Arabic is pervading through education — but a 'loss of competence' was never observed.'' )〕 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.〔Rouchdy 1992a:95〕 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 argued that there is no evidence of a dialectal distinction at all.〔Werner (1987:18—24), see also Bell (1974).〕 Nobiin should not be confused with the Arabic-based creole Ki-Nubi. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Nobiin language」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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