‘We’re losing our identity’: the young Egyptians fighting to save the ancient Nubian tongue
Born and raised in Nubia, southern Egypt, the 29year-old Jehad Ashraf is the first in her family to grow up not understanding the Nubian language. “I lived in Aswan my whole life”, she says, “but none of my family spoke Nubian to me at home.”
In just two generations the language, once spoken everywhere in the region, has almost vanished. In her village, a date-farming community on the banks of the Nile, “the youngest who speak Nubian are 61 or 62. It is becoming extinct,” says Ashraf.
It is the same throughout Egypt, and that’s something she wants to change. Last year, she helped launch the online service Nobig Koro (Learn Nubian) to encourage young people to learn the language. It is one of a number of initiatives in recent years to reach young Nubians at home and abroad and keep the language and culture from dying out.
Ashraf started taking Nubian classes in Cairo where she went to study legal translation. “Since I was young, I was attracted to the language,” she says. She made two friends on the course, the 31-year-old Wessam Fathy and Mostafa Fares, also 31. Both were born to Nubian parents but unable to speak the language.
The three of them started a weekly study group to go over what they learned in class and practise singing the songs their teacher wrote out for them in Nubian and Arabic. “Nubian songs have everything you find in the language”, says Ashraf, “so we would memorise them, practise singing them and discuss the words we didn’t know.”
Posting their sessions online was a way to “share the things we learned, the things we love, with other young Nubians”, says Ashraf. They soon realised there were many others who felt disconnected from their heritage. “The new generation are more educated,” says Fares. “They can feel that they are losing their identity.”
There are no statistics on how many Nubians live in Egypt. Estimates range from 300,000 to 5 million, spread throughout the country. In the 1960s, much of Old Nubia was destroyed by the construction of the Aswan High
Dam, which flooded the region upstream from Aswan. Between 50,000 and 130,000 people were forced to move from ancient villages, mostly to Cairo, Alexandria or purpose-built accommodation in the desert – all areas where Arabic was spoken.
“Nubians started to dissolve”, says the 73-year-old teacher Mohamed Sobhy, “like when you put sugar in water.”
Born 10 miles downstream from the dam, Sobhy’s family was spared displacement, but throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as more children began attending school, he witnessed the language fading away. No Egyptian school or university teaches Nubian, and parents were keen for their children to speak fluent Arabic.
“We are in a country that is poor,” says Sobhy. “To make people learn Nubian, you have to tell them it will give them jobs. If not, it is in vain.”
Sobhy translates songs and collates folk stories and phrases. “I keep doing it because maybe, someday, someone will continue,” he says. “At the least, I want to leave a record of Nubian literature.”
In 2017, he established a YouTube channel, which has racked up over 70,000 views, uploading videos of himself reciting Nubian poetry, explaining expressions and breaking down songs. “I am one of the people who want to teach Nubian through songs,” he says. “People know the songs but they don’t know the meaning.”
Although the language has gone from everyday conversation, it has survived through Nubian music. Both classical and contemporary Nubian artists remain popular in southern Egypt, performing in a style distinct from Arabic pop songs because of its traditional instruments and rhythms.
“The songs are a kind of glue, holding us to the language,” says Fares, who often finds people singing along to the songs without knowing the meaning.
Another initiative to teach the language to children is Nubi App, founded by the 33-year-old computer programmer Momen Talosh. Talosh’s parents had forgotten the language after moving to Alexandria as children. As an adult, Talosh took lessons at a Nubian social club. “The language is the most important thing that we’re trying to hold on to,” he says.
“Whether you’re concerned with Nubian identity or Nubian traditions, without the language, there’s nothing.”
He launched the app in 2017, offering basic phrases in one of four Nubian dialects, with translation in Arabic and English. Neither Talosh nor his team of five volunteers take a salary, and the app has been downloaded more than 10,000 times.
Talosh has travelled to countries with Nubian-speaking populations including Tunisia, Sudan and Kenya to promote it. “Our generation has the tools to help people learn the language,” he says. “We wanted to do this for people everywhere, even people outside Egypt.”
But teacher Khairiya Musa, 65, says that, despite such initiatives, there may not be another generation speaking Nubian. Forced out of her village by the dam, Musa grew up in a displacement settlement that “was just desert and rocks”. She now lives and teaches Nubian in a densely populated neighbourhood in Giza. She also has a YouTube channel to which she uploads short Nubian lessons and cooking tuto
rials.
“We need to teach children Nubian,” she says. “We want to teach them in schools and we want the government to support us.”
For the government, Nubian is a sensitive subject. In the wake of the 2010-2011 Arab spring, activists successfully campaigned to have Nubians’ “right to return” to the shores of the dam’s reservoir written into the 2014 constitution. But since then, there has been little progress on the issue.
Under President Abdel Fattah ElSisi, political activism has been outlawed in Egypt. In 2016, a protest march to the lands surrounding the lake was broken up by police and its leaders arrested. The following year, 24 activists were detained after police violently broke up a peaceful protest in Aswan.
“Right to return is no longer discussed because people know that they won’t get it,” says human rights researcher Fatma Emam Sakory, once involved in lobbying for Nubian issues. “Even the people I used to work with on the constitution committee are not active,” she says.
But as politics have become less accessible, Eman adds, young people are “talking more about culture and language”.
Rising interest among young Nubians has made advocates of the language “very optimistic”, says Musa. “Before, there was no hope.” When she began teaching Nubian seven years ago, she was resigned to the fact that the language would soon disappear. “But now, most young people want to learn,” she says. “So there is hope.”