Nobiin & Nubian Alphabet

Nobiin is the northernmost of the Nile Nubian languages and the closest living relative of Old Nubian, the written language of the medieval Christian kingdoms of Nubia, above all Makuria with its capital at Old Dongola. Old Nubian manuscripts, from roughly the 8th to the 15th century, are written in an alphabet taken from Coptic, which is itself the Greek alphabet with a few letters added in Egypt. The grid starts with the 24 Greek-derived letters in their Coptic order and shapes: ⲁ ⲃ ⲅ ⲇ ⲉ ⲍ ⲏ ⲑ ⲓ ⲕ ⲗ ⲙ ⲛ ⲝ ⲟ ⲡ ⲣ ⲥ ⲧ ⲩ ⲫ ⲭ ⲯ ⲱ.

Nubian scribes needed sounds that Greek and Coptic did not write. They took ϣ (sh) and ϩ (h) from Coptic, used their own form of Coptic shima, ⳝ, and added three letters generally traced to the older Meroitic script of the Kingdom of Kush: ⳡ for ny (like Spanish ñ), ⳟ for ng (as in English sing) and ⳣ for w. These three make a text look Nubian rather than Coptic, which is why ⳡ is this page's icon.

Letters such as ⲑ, ⲫ, ⲭ, ⲯ, ⲝ and ⲍ appear mostly in Greek names and church words in the old texts. Old Nubian also uses a supralinear stroke, which often marks a preceding /i/ (in Coptic it marks syllabic consonants); on a computer it is typed as a combining overline or macron after the letter.

How Nobiin is written today

Nobiin has no official status in Sudan or Egypt, and for centuries after the Christian kingdoms ended it was mainly spoken, not written. Today it is written in three ways. Many speakers simply use Arabic letters, since Arabic is the school language in both countries (see our Arabic Letters collection, and Sudanese Arabic and Egyptian Arabic for the spoken Arabic around it). Linguists usually write it in the Latin alphabet. And since the late 20th century Nubian activists and teachers have revived the Old Nubian alphabet for modern Nobiin, the set shown here, sometimes called the new Nubian alphabet, in community classes, primers and signs.

Nobiin is a tonal language and tells long and short vowels apart, so careful spellings in any script mark vowel length, often by doubling the vowel, as in the name Nobiin itself.

How to type Nubian letters

Windows and macOS ship no Nubian keyboard, so the simplest way is to copy the letters from this page. All of them are standard Unicode characters: most are in the Coptic block, while ϣ and ϩ are in the Greek and Coptic block, so they paste into any message, document or post; what matters is a font that has them. Noto Sans Coptic covers the whole Coptic block including the Nubian letters, and the free Coptic font Antinoou was made with Old Nubian in mind.

In HTML, use the code points: ⳡ for ⳡ, ⳟ for ⳟ, ⳣ for ⳣ and ⳝ for ⳝ; each capital is one lower (Ⳡ is Ⳡ). In Microsoft Word on Windows, type the code point and press Alt+X: 2ce1 then Alt+X gives ⳡ. On a Mac, add the Unicode Hex Input source and hold Option while typing 2ce1.

Where Nobiin is spoken

Nobiin, called Mahas in Sudan and Fadicca (Fadija) in Egypt, is spoken along the Nile from Aswan in Egypt south into northern Sudan. CLDR lists about 420,000 Nobiin speakers for Sudan, but a large share of Nobiin speakers live in southern Egypt, so both flags 🇸🇩 🇪🇬 belong on this page.

The Aswan High Dam, built in the 1960s, flooded much of old Nubia under Lake Nasser, called Lake Nubia in Sudan. Tens of thousands of Nubians were resettled, Egyptian Nubians mostly to new villages around Kom Ombo and Sudanese Nubians from Wadi Halfa to New Halfa far to the east, and in both places writing and teaching the language has become part of keeping Nubian identity. Its nearest relatives are Kenzi and Dongolawi, the other Nile Nubian languages. For the countries themselves, see our Sudan and Egypt collections, and Coptic and Greek for the parent alphabets.