Midob (also spelt Meidob) is the language of the

Midob people The Midob people are an ethnic group from the Meidob Hills region in Darfur, Sudan. They speak Midob, one of the Nubian languages (part of the larger family of Nilo-Saharan languages). The population of this ethnic group possibly exceeds 50,000. ...

North Darfur North Darfur State ( ar, ولاية شمال دارفور Wilāyat Šamāl Dārfūr; ''Shamal Darfor'') is one of the wilayat or states of Sudan. It is one of the five states composing the Darfur region. It has an area of 296,420 km2 and a ...

Sudan Sudan ( or ; ar, السودان, as-Sūdān, officially the Republic of the Sudan ( ar, جمهورية السودان, link=no, Jumhūriyyat as-Sūdān), is a country in Northeast Africa. It shares borders with the Central African Republic t ...

. It is one of the

Nubian languages The Nubian languages ( ar, لُغَات نُوبِيّة, lughāt nūbiyyah) are a group of related languages spoken by the Nubians. They form a branch of the Eastern Sudanic languages, which is part of the wider Nilo-Saharan phylum. Initially, ...

, which are part of the

Nilo-Saharan The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50–60 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet. T ...

language phylum. Apart from in their homeland of Malha, North Darfur, Midob speakers also live in the

Khartoum Khartoum or Khartum ( ; ar, الخرطوم, Al-Khurṭūm, din, Kaartuɔ̈m) is the capital of Sudan. With a population of 5,274,321, its metropolitan area is the largest in Sudan. It is located at the confluence of the White Nile, flowing n ...

area (primarily in

Omdurman Omdurman (standard ar, أم درمان ''Umm Durmān'') is a city in Sudan. It is the most populated city in the country, and thus also in the State of Khartoum. Omdurman lies on the west bank of the River Nile, opposite and northwest of the ...

and the Gezira region) and Jezirat Aba.Rilly, Claude. 2010. ''Le méroïtique et sa famille linguistique''. Leuven: Peeters Publishers. The Midob people call their language ''tìd-n-áal'', literally "mouth of the Midob", and themselves ''tìddí'' (singular), ''tìd'' (plural). There are an estimated 50,000 Midob speakers in two main dialects, Urrti and Kaageddi. Rilly (2010:162) lists the dialects of Urrti, Shalkota, and Torti. Only Urrti has been described in detail. Recent research on Midob has been done by Thelwall (1983) and Werner (1993). Both studies concerned the Urrti dialect.

Phonology

The following tables show the phonological consonants and vowels without phonetic variations and without more recent

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C ...

loans.

Vowels

Note: All vowels occur long and short. The

mid central vowel The mid central vowel (also known as schwa) is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a ə, rotated lowercase letter e. While the ''Handbook of th ...

''ə'' only appears in Midob, not in other Nubian languages.

Consonants

Tone

Midob is a tonal language with two registers: High and Low. Tone is both lexical and grammatical.

Grammar

Midob is an

agglutinative language An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) tend to remain ...

, like the other Nubian languages. The default word order is SOV.

Verb

The verbs consist of: :verbal stem ( + extension ) + tense/aspect. The stem is not altered. Extensions modify or add meaning to the verb like

negation In logic, negation, also called the logical complement, is an operation that takes a proposition P to another proposition "not P", written \neg P, \mathord P or \overline. It is interpreted intuitively as being true when P is false, and false ...

, intention, affirmation, completed action, plurality of subject–object or action,

durative The delimitative aspect is a grammatical aspect that indicates that a situation lasts only a certain amount of time.Stephen Dickey. 2007. "A prototype account of the development of delimitative ''po-'' in Russian". In Dagmar Divjak and Agata Kochań ...

, habitual and sometimes can be combined (especially negation).

Tense and aspect

Midob has two basic tenses (Perfect and Continuous) plus Intentional. There are sets of suffixes for

indicative A realis mood (abbreviated ) is a grammatical mood which is used principally to indicate that something is a statement of fact; in other words, to express what the speaker considers to be a known state of affairs, as in declarative sentences. Most ...

subjunctive The subjunctive (also known as conjunctive in some languages) is a grammatical mood, a feature of the utterance that indicates the speaker's attitude towards it. Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality ...

and two question forms (to ask for a fact, i.e. "When/Why..." and to verify a fact, i.e. "Did you..."). Sets of personal endings:

References

*Werner, Roland (1993) 'Tìdn-áal: A Study of Midob (Darfur-Nubian)' Berlin: Dietrich Reimer. *Thelwall, Robin (1983) 'Meidob Nubian: Phonology, Grammatical Notes and Basic Vocabulary' in Bender, M. L. (Ed), ''Nilo-Saharan Language Studies'', V.13, East Lansing

External links

Midob
from mille langues blog
Midob Material
from the Research of Roland Werner {{Eastern Sudanic languages Nubian languages Languages of Sudan