The Arabic Language

16.4 An Arabic creole
The one example of an Arabic pidgin that was creolised is that of Nubi, which 
developed out of Juba Arabic. After the Mahdist revolt in the Sudan, the German 
commander of the Anglo-Egyptian army, Emin Pasha, became isolated in the 
south from the military bases in Upper Egypt. He decided to join the English army 
in Kenya and Uganda, followed by many of the Nubian soldiers, who eventually 
settled down in these British colonies. Some of them took indigenous wives, who 
spoke Bantu languages, Swahili or Kikuyu in Kenya, and Luganda in Uganda. In 
these mixed marriages, the language of communication was the Arabic pidgin, 
which the soldiers had learned in the army camps in Egypt. The children who 
grew up in these mixed marriages started to creolise the language, and the result 

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The Arabic Language
was a new variety of Arabic. After the largest ethnic group among the soldiers, it 
became known as Nubi or Ki-Nubi (with the Bantu prefix for names of languages). 
It continues to be spoken in Uganda by 26,000 speakers and in Kenya by 15,000 
people (according to the Ethnologue). In the 1970s, during the rule of Idi Amin, 
the Nubi-speaking community in Uganda enjoyed a certain prestige because their 
military strength was regarded as an asset for the regime. After the fall of Idi 
Amin in 1979, some of the Nubi speakers started to take steps towards the preser
-
vation of their language in order to maintain their social and political position 
in the country.
Nubi exhibits many of the features of ‘classic’ creolised languages, such 
as Jamaican English or Haitian Créole. Its phonemic system has undergone a 
drastic restructuring compared with the source language from which it derives, 
ultimately a form of Upper Egyptian. The emphatic consonants have merged with 
their non-emphatic counterparts; /ḥ/ and /ʿ/ have disappeared; /ḫ/ and /ġ/ 
have merged and become /k/. The reflexes of Classical Arabic /q/ and /j/ in Nubi 
correspond to the Upper Egyptian origin of the language: /g/ and /j/. Word-final 
consonants have in many cases been dropped. A few examples may demonstrate 
to what extent Nubi words differ from their Arabic source: 
rági
‘man’ (Arabic 
rajul
; 
Egyptian Arabic 
rāgil
), 
sondú
‘box’ (Arabic 
ṣandūq
), 
sokolá
‘things’ (newly formed 
plural 
*šuġūlāt
from Arabic singular 
šuġl
). Many words were taken over by Nubi 
together with the Arabic article, for example, 
láádum
‘bone’ (Arabic 
al-ʿaḏ̣
m
), 
lasía
‘evening’ (Arabic 
al-ʿašiyya
), 
lifíli
‘elephant’ (Arabic 
al-fīl
).
A newly developed trait in Nubi is the distinction between a high (H) and a 
low (L) tone, as in Bongor Arabic (Wellens 2005: 54–5). It might be added that 
the dominant language, Luganda, has a tonal system, too. In Nubi, the distinc
-
tion seems to have grammatical relevance as well. According to Wellens, tone in 
addition to stress plays a role in the verbal system. The bare stem of the verb is 
marked by stress on the first syllable and a distinctive tonal pattern, for example, 
kásulu 
HLL ‘to wash’. Three other verbal forms have been developed with a 
different stress and tone pattern: the infinitive 
kásulu 
HHL, the gerund 
kasúlu 
LHL and the passive 
kasulú 
LLH. The gerund and the infinitive are used as verbal 
nouns, as in (9) and (10):
(9)