Growing up in Arabic-speaking Cairo and Alexandria has not afforded 20-year-old Asmaa Shater many opportunities to learn the language of her ancestors. She lives nearly 700 kilometers north of Aswan province, where Nubian is still spoken. Her exposure to the ancient tongue has been limited to listening in on her mother’s conversations with her grandmother, who still resides in Aswan.
Growing up in Arabic-speaking Cairo and Alexandria has not afforded 20-year-old Asmaa Shater many opportunities to learn the language of her ancestors. She lives nearly 700 kilometers north of Aswan province, where Nubian is still spoken. Her exposure to the ancient tongue has been limited to listening in on her mother’s conversations with her grandmother, who still resides in Aswan.
Twice a week, Asmaa watches NubaTube, a recently launched YouTube channel aimed at promoting the Nubian language. She repeats the vocabulary words after the channel’s host, and tries to hold a conversation in Nubian with her friends. However, the group soon runs out of vocabulary and switches back to Arabic.
The reinvigoration of the Nubian language is long overdue, says NubaTube founder Mohammad Azmi, who also heads the General Nubian Union of towns and villages in Aswan province. Although an estimated 2 million Egyptians identify as Nubian, mass migration from their traditional homeland in the south to northern cities has endangered their mother tongue. Only 30 percent of Nubian villages are purely Nubian-speaking, according to studies conducted by Azmi.
If current trends persist, the Nubian language will be extinct within the next 75 years, Azmi says, “which requires a serious revival effort.” While a number of Nubian language courses and websites already exist, NubaTube is the first to provide broadcasts in Nubian. The channel is run by a group of journalism students, some of whom are Nubian, and uses simple recording equipment to broadcast educational material, folklore and news translated from other languages. With its growing following of Internet users, NubaTube aims to expose a wider audience to Nubian at a time where many – especially young people – have forsaken it, Azmi adds.
Seasons of migration
The decline of the Nubian tongue is largely caused by the mass displacement of the inhabitants of Egypt’s south over the course of the past century. Some 68 Nubian towns and villages were razed to make way for government-sponsored water infrastructure since 1902, when work started on the Aswan Reservoir project. In the decades that followed, the resulting migrations took place without governmental forewarnings or aid, according to the historian Ahmad Al-Kurdi.
The most expansive displacement occurred in 1964, when the Egyptian government razed more than 40 Nubian villages that lay upriver from Aswan Dam. Residents were resettled to a plateau below the dam, to new developments that bore the names of their original villages. These migrations scattered the Nubian people throughout the country and undermined their cultural and linguistic cohesion, Al-Kurdi writes.
After decades of fighting for their rights, Egypt’s new constitution of 2013-14 allowed Nubians to return to the banks behind the dam, which had been their main demand for decades, says Fatima Imam Skouri, a counselor for Hajaj Adol, the Nubian representative at the Fifty Committee formed to amend the constitution in 2012. By mandating that cultural diversity be respected, the constitution also guaranteed Nubians the right to preserve and celebrate their culture and lead decision-making processes in remote Nubian areas slated for resettlement.
Statistics published in 2015 by the Department of Drafting and Statistics show that the population of Aswan province has reached 1.486 million people, of whom not all are Nubian. Another half a million Nubians now live across the provinces of Ismailia, Suez, Alexandria and Cairo.
Towards institutionalization
According to Azmi, NubaTube is one of many attempts to preserve Nubian language and culture. Nubian activist Mohammad Abdulbaset has launched the successful Facebook campaign “Kallemni Nubi” (Talk to me in Nubian), where he translated a number of Nubian lyrics and proverbs to Arabic. In Cairo, the Nubian Club holds language courses and workshops. The Center for Documenting Nubian Folklore, founded by Nubian intellectuals, documents ancient language and culture. A separate department of Nubian folklore exists at the Center for Documenting Cultural and Natural Heritage at the Library of Alexandria.
But preserving the Nubian folklore must become a priority for the Egyptian state, and should not be left up to the Nubian community alone, says Ahmad Saleh, head of the Department of Nubian Artifacts in Aswan. “The state’s ban on using it in social and educational institutions is still a major reason for concern, especially since the new generations do not have the incentive to learn it,” he says. “The Arabic language is dominant in Egypt, be it at school or in other social domains, and this is pushing Nubian families to pressure their children to learn and speak Nubian, at least at home.”
Aside from advocating the inclusion of Nubian in high school and university curriculums, Dr. Osama Abdulwareth, an expert at on the Arabian region at UNESCO, stressed the importance of teaching the Nubian language to young girls, since mothers play the biggest role in teaching language to children. He also urged Nubians to use the language more in their daily lives.
Laila Hamoud, a Nubian housewife living in Cairo, enrolls her children in language courses at the Nubian Center in Cairo in hopes they will learn to speak their ancestral tongue. “I was born in Cairo in 1980, but I understand Nubian very well because my parents used to speak it at home all the time,” she says. “I want to teach this language to my children and am elated with initiatives to raise interest in learning it.”
