Nubi language

Nubi is a creole that emerged in the late nineteenth century as spoken by the Egyptian army's Sudanese troops and camp followers. Some people are multilingual, employing Nubi, Swahili, and English. Swahili has influenced Nubi at the lexical, phonological, and morphological levels. The development of a standardized form of writing and the recording of oral literature are taking place within the culture. == Phonology ==

Vowels Sources: There are five vowels in Nubi. Vowels are not distinguished by length except in at least two exceptions from Kenyan Nubi (which are not present in Ugandan dialects) where means "outside" and is an adverb while means "the outside" and is a noun, and also where meaning "bewitch" is compared to meaning "herd, cattle". Despite this, there is a tendency for vowels in stressed syllables to be registered as long vowels. Each of the vowels has multiple allophones and the exact sound of the vowel depends on the surrounding consonants. Consonants Sources: Speakers may use Standard Arabic phonemes for words for which the Arabic pronunciation has been learned. The retroflex version of the /r/ sound may also occur and some dialects use /l/ in its place. Geminates are very unusual in Nubi. These less common phonemes are shown in brackets. Ineke Wellens gives the following orthography for Nubi where it differs from the IPA symbols: // = sh; /t/ = ch; // = j; // = ny; /w/ = w or u; /j/ = y or i; // = th; // = dh; /x/ = kh; // = ḥ. Syllable structure Syllables typically have a CV, VC, V or CVC structure with VC only occurring in initial syllables. Final and initial CC occur only in a few specific examples such as which means "school" or which means "sun". Stress can change the meaning of words for example means "seven" or "morning" depending on whether the stress is on the first or second syllables respectively. Vowels are often omitted in unstressed, final syllables and sometime even the stressed final "u" in the passive form may be deleted after "m", "n", "l", "f" or "b". This can cause syllables to be realigned even across words. ==Grammar==

Nominals Nouns are inflected by number only (taking a singular or plural form) although for most nouns this does not represent a morphological change. Jonathan Owens gives 5 broad inflectional categories of nouns: • Nouns which undergo a stress shift when the plural is formed. • Nouns which undergo apophony. • Nouns which take a suffix and undergo a stress shift in the plural form. • Nouns which form the plural by suppletion • Bantu loan-words which take different prefixes in the singular and plural forms The table below shows examples of each type of pluralisation. The apostrophe has been placed before the stressed syllable: 1 may be supplemented by a suffix as if it were type 3, thus, could also mean "women". Adjectives follow the noun and some adjectives have singular and plural forms which must agree with the noun. Adjectives may also take the prefixes , , or which mark them as habitual. Possessor nouns follow the possessed, with a particle placed in between. In the case of inalienable possession the particle is omitted. ==See also==