Modern Nubian Aswan
There are Nubian neighbourhoods in Aswan city, Nubian villages on Elephantine, Nubian towns north of here around Kom Ombo, and a large Nubian population in Cairo and Alexandria. Nubian Egyptians are Egyptian citizens with a distinct language, history and identity. Nobiin and Kenzi are living languages and you will hear them in the street here.
Nobiin — also called Fadicca or Fadija — is spoken in the southern part of Egyptian Nubia and across the border. Kenzi, also Kunuz or Matoki, is spoken nearer Aswan and is closely related to Dongolawi further south. The two are not mutually intelligible, and neither is related to Arabic.
Both are taught mostly at home, are not written in most households, and are considered at risk.
Almost every Nubian house you will see around Aswan was built after 1964, because the villages they replaced are under the lake. That does not make the decoration on them any less Nubian — the painting tradition is older than the walls carrying it.
Nobiin and Kenzi are Nubian languages of the Nilo-Saharan family. They are not related to Arabic at all.
Tribe, primitive, exotic, untouched, frozen in time, authentic. These are not neutral descriptions that happen to be old-fashioned; they are the vocabulary of describing people as scenery.
The two are not interchangeable, and greetings in the right one land differently from Arabic ones.
In the villages on Elephantine, in Nubian neighbourhoods of the city, and in Gharb Soheil. It is an ordinary street language here, not a performance.
Nobiin and Kenzi as living Nubian languages of the Nilo-Saharan family, not dialects of Arabic, and not mutually intelligible with each other.
The museum opened in 1997 and was developed with UNESCO to hold and explain material recovered before the flooding.
Reviewed by no Nubian editor appointed yet · We will not mark this section reviewed until a real, named person has read it.