Beja Language Alphabet

Beja is the language of the Beja people of north-east Africa, the camel and goat herders, townspeople and port workers of the Red Sea Hills and the plains around Kassala. Its speakers call it Bidhaawyeet; older books write To Bedawie or Tu-Bedawie, and Arabic calls the people البجا (al-Bija). Its language code is bej. The main Beja groups include the Hadendawa, the Bishariin and the Amarar.

Ethnologue's 2022 estimates count about 2.55 million Beja speakers in Sudan and 121,000 in Eritrea. Beja is also spoken by communities in south-eastern Egypt. In Sudan it is widely spoken in Red Sea and Kassala states and heard every day in Port Sudan, Suakin and Kassala. In western Eritrea 🇪🇷, the Hedareb are one of the nine recognised peoples. Treat every number as a rough estimate.

Beja is an Afroasiatic language of the Cushitic family and is usually counted as the only member of its northern branch. Its relatives are therefore Afar, Saho, Somali and Oromo rather than Arabic, although centuries of trade and Islam have filled it with Arabic loanwords and many Beja also speak Sudanese Arabic. Afar, Saho, Somali, Oromo, Tigre, Arabic and Sudanese Arabic have their own collections, and so does Sudan.

Beja writing: Latin in Eritrea, limited Arabic-based use

Beja has no single standardized spelling. In Eritrea, Latin script has been used in schools since independence in 1993; in Sudan, Beja remains mostly oral, and attempts to establish an Arabic-based orthography did not take hold. The 28 right-to-left letters shown here are the standard Arabic alphabet, not a standardized Beja alphabet. The grid groups those Arabic letters by shape: ب ت ث share one body and differ only in their dots, as do ج ح خ, د ذ, ر ز, س ش, ص ض, ط ظ and ع غ. Hamza ء and its seats أ إ آ ؤ ئ, ta marbuta ة and alif maqsura ى appear mostly in words borrowed from Arabic.

Arabic script normally omits short vowels. Arabic-based Beja spellings can mark them with fatha َ (a), kasra ِ (i) and damma ُ (u), which matter because Beja distinguishes short from long vowels. Each is a combining character, so paste it after the letter it belongs to: بَ is ba. Long /aː/, /iː/ and /uː/ can be written with ا, ي and و; Beja spelling systems vary in how they write long /eː/ and /oː/.

Linguists' grammars and dictionaries write Beja in Latin letters, which is where the spelling Bidhaawyeet comes from: long vowels are doubled (aa, ee, ii, oo, uu) and the digraph dh stands for a d made with the tongue curled back. That Latin spelling uses plain A–Z letters, so it needs nothing beyond an ordinary keyboard.

Beja sounds the Arabic alphabet does not show

Beja has five vowels. a, i and u come short or long, and e and o are always long, so a word can change its meaning just by holding a vowel longer. In Arabic letters a long vowel shows as ا و ي, but the difference between short a, i and u disappears unless the marks َ ِ ُ are written, and standard Arabic has no letters for e and o at all.

Beja also has retroflex consonants, a t and a d said with the tip of the tongue curled back, as in Bidhaawyeet. The 28 standard Arabic letters have no letter for them, so writers use the nearest Arabic letter or a local convention.

Grammar works differently too. Beja nouns are masculine or feminine, and "the" is a prefix that shows gender: the tu- in To Bedawie is the feminine article. Many Beja verbs also change their vowels inside the word as well as taking prefixes and suffixes, a trait Beja shares with other Afroasiatic languages, Arabic included.

How to type Arabic letters for Beja on Windows, Mac and phone

Windows: Settings › Time & language › Language & region › Add a language › Arabic, then switch keyboards with Windows + Space. On the Arabic (101) layout the vowel marks sit on the Shift layer of the left-hand letter keys; letters join on their own as you type. Mac: System Settings › Keyboard › Input Sources › Edit › + › Arabic, then switch with Control + Space or the globe key.

iPhone and Android: add an Arabic keyboard in the keyboard settings and tap the globe key to switch; where the vowel marks sit depends on the keyboard app, and you can always copy them from the grid above. Text direction changes on its own as soon as you start typing Arabic.

HTML: the characters work as they are in UTF-8; add dir="rtl" to the element so the text runs right to left, and lang="bej" to tell search engines and screen readers the text is Beja. Numeric references help when a page cannot hold the characters, for example ؟ for ؟ and َ for the fatha َ.

Beja country: coffee, camels and the Red Sea

The emoji in this collection are the ones Beja speakers and their friends actually reach for. ☕ and 🫖 stand for jabana (جبنة), the coffee of eastern Sudan, roasted at home, often spiced with ginger, and poured from a round clay pot into small cups for guests, a ritual closely tied to the Beja. 🐪, 🐐 and 🐑 are the herds of the Red Sea Hills, and the Bishariin, a Beja group living in Sudan and southern Egypt, are known for their camels.

🗡️ and ⚔️ recall the long sword and curved dagger that belong to traditional Beja men's dress. 🌊 and 🚢 are the Red Sea coast: Port Sudan (بورتسودان), the country's main port, and Suakin (سواكن), the old coral-stone harbour town just to the south. ⛰️ fits the granite hills around Kassala (كسلا), and 🕌 the Islam of nearly all Beja.

Sudan's pound has no sign of its own: write SDG or LS in Latin text and ج.س in Arabic. The full set of Sudan emoji, from the flag colours ❤️🤍🖤💚 to the pyramids of Meroë, is in the Sudan collection; the Ge'ez letters of Tigre and Tigrinya, Beja's neighbours in Eritrea, are in theirs.