Beja ( or ) is an Afroasiatic language of the Cushitic branch spoken on the western coast of the Red Sea by the Beja people. Its speakers inhabit parts of Egypt, Sudan and Eritrea.
Name The name Beja, derived from , is most common in English-language literature. Native speakers use the term (indefinite) or (definite). Geographical distribution Beja is spoken by the Beja people in parts of Sudan, Eritrea & Egypt. In 2022 there were 2,550,000 Beja speakers in Sudan, and 121,000 Beja speakers in Eritrea according to Ethnologue. As of 2023 there are an estimated 88,000 Beja speakers in Egypt. The total number of speakers in all three countries is 2,759,000.
Classification Beja is held by most linguists to be part of the Cushitic branch of the Afroasiatic family, constituting the only member of the Northern Cushitic subgroup. As such, Beja contains a number of linguistic innovations that are unique to it, as is also the situation with the other subgroups of Cushitic (e.g. idiosyncratic features in Agaw or Central Cushitic). The characteristics of Beja that differ from those of other Cushitic languages are likewise generally acknowledged as normal branch variation.
The relation of the Northern Cushitic branch of Cushitic to the other branches is unknown. Christopher Ehret proposes, based on the devoicing of Proto-Cushitic voiced velar fricatives, that Northern Cushitic is possibly more closely related to South Cushitic than to the other branches.
The identification of Beja as an independent branch of Cushitic dates to the work of Enrico Cerulli between 1925 and 1951. Due to Beja's linguistic innovations, Robert Hetzron argued that it constituted an independent branch of Afroasiatic. Hetzron's proposal was generally rejected by other linguists, and Cerulli's identification of Beja as the sole member of a North Cushitic branch remains standard today across otherwise divergent proposals for the internal relations of the Cushitic language family.
History
Christopher Ehret proposes the following sequence of sound changes between Proto-Cushitic and Beja: PC * → * (alveolar ejective affricate becomes palatal ejective stop) PC * → * (dental ejective stop becomes alveolar ejective affricate) *Cʼ → C (ejectives become their non-ejective voiceless counterparts) [+lateral/+obstruent] → [+retroflex/+obstruent] (that is, * and * become and , respectively) PC * → * (voiced alveolar affricate becomes voiceless) * → (voiceless alveolar affricate becomes a fricative);* → (voiceless palatal plosive becomes a postalveolar fricative) * → PC * → * (labialized voiced velar fricative becomes voiceless) * → * (velar fricatives become plosives) PC * → /V_V (lateral fricative becomes alveolar tap between vowels) PC * → /#_ (lateral fricative becomes lateral approximant word-initially) PC *z → /V_ (a consonant of unknown value becomes palatal approximant after vowels) PC *z → /#_ (the same consonant of unknown value becomes voiced alveolar stop word-initially) PC *, * → (all nasals but collapse into alveolar nasal)
Ehret's reconstructed Proto-Cushitic *z is not a voiced alveolar fricative, but a consonant of unknown value. Ehret proposes that it might be a voiced palatal plosive .
Some linguists and paleographers believe that they have uncovered evidence of an earlier stage of Beja, referred to in different publications as "Old Bedauye" or "Old Beja." Helmut Satzinger has identified the names found on several third century CE ostraca (potsherds) from the Eastern Desert as likely Blemmyan, representing a form of Old Beja. He also identifies several epigraphic texts from the fifth and sixth centuries as representing a later form of the same language. Nubiologist Gerald Browne, Egyptologist Helmut Satzinger, and Cushiticist Klaus Wedekind believed that an ostracon discovered in a monastery in Saqqarah also represents the Old Beja language. Browne and Wedekind identified the text as a translation of Psalm 30.
Phonology +Consonants Labial Dental/Alveolar Retroflex Palatal Velar Glottalplainlabialized Nasal()()()Plosivevoicelessvoiced Fricativevoiceless() voiced()()TrillApproximant
Nasals other than and are positional variants of . The consonants and only appear in Arabic loanwords in some speakers' speech; in others', they are replaced by or and . Some speakers replace in Arabic loanwords with .
Beja has the five vowels , , , , and . and only appear long, while , , and have long and short variants.
FrontCentralBackClose MidOpen
Beja has pitch accent.
Orthography Both Roman and Arabic script have been used to write Beja. The Roman orthography below is that used by the Eritrean government and was used in a literacy program at Red Sea University in Port Sudan from 2010 to 2013. Three Arabic orthographies have seen limited use: The first below was that used by the now defunct Website Sakanab; the second was devised by Muhammad Adaroob Muhammad and used in his translation of E.M. Roper's Beja lexicon; the third was devised by Mahmud Ahmad Abu Bikr Ooriib, and was employed briefly at Red Sea University in 2019. No system of writing has gained wide support. The only system to have been employed in publications by more than one writer is the Latin script.
+Beja OrthographiesIPARomanArabic (Usakana)Arabic (MHM)Arabic (RSU) colspan = "2" colspan = "2"
In the Roman orthography, the vowels are written with the letters corresponding to the IPA symbols (i.e., ). Long vowels are written with doubled signs. As and cannot be short vowels, they only appear as and , respectively.
The single sign, however, does have a use: To distinguish between and , is used for the former and for the latter. Similarly, is , is , is . Single is not used.
In all Arabic orthographies, short vowels are written with the same diacritics used in Arabic: fatḥah for (), kasrah for (), ḍammah for (). 'Alif (ا) is used as the seat for these diacritics at the beginning of a word. Long is written with 'alif () preceded by fatḥah, or alif maddah () when word-initial. Long is written with yā' preceded by kasrah. Long is written with wāw preceded by ḍammah. The systems vary on the representation of long and long . In the Usakana system, is written with a modified Kurdish yā' ; in the system devised by Muhammad Adaroob Muhammad it is represented by yā' with a shaddah ; in the Red Sea University system, it is not distinguished from the yā' for or . In the Usakana system, is written with a modified Kurdish wāw ; in the system devised by Muhammad Adaroob Muhammad it is represented by wāw with a shaddah ; in the Red Sea University system, it is not distinguished from the wāw for or .
Pitch accent is not marked in any orthography. In Wedekind, Wedekind, and Musa (2006 and 2007), stressed syllables are indicated in boldface.
In addition to these two systems and several academic systems of transcribing Beja texts, it is possible that Beja was at least occasionally written in the Greek alphabet-based Coptic script during the Middle Ages.
Grammar Nouns, articles, and adjectives Beja nouns and adjectives have two genders: masculine and feminine, two numbers: singular and plural, two cases: nominative and oblique, and may be definite, indefinite, or in construct state. Gender, case, and definiteness are not marked on the noun itself, but on clitics and affixes. Singular-plural pairs in Beja are unpredictable.
Plural forms Plurals may be formed by: the addition of a suffix to the singular stem: 'house', 'houses' (the final -b is an indefinite suffix) the shortening of the final syllable of the singular stem (or Ablaut in this syllable): 'camel', 'camels' shift of the accent from the ultimate to the penultimate syllable: 'lion', 'lions' (orthographically identical) a combination of these. A small number of nouns do not distinguish between singular and plural forms. Some nouns are always plural. A few nouns have suppletive plurals.
Case and definiteness A noun may be prefixed by a clitic definite article, or have an indefinite suffix. Definite articles indicate gender, number, and case. The indefinite suffix marks gender only, and does not appear in the nominative case. For feminine common nouns, the indefinite suffix is ; for masculine nouns and feminine proper nouns, . The indefinite suffixes only appear after vowels. The definite article is proclitic. It has the following forms with masculine monosyllabic nouns that do not begin with or (note that an initial glottal stop is usually omitted in writing, and that all words that appear to be vowel-initial actually begin with a glottal stop):
Nominative Oblique Singular Plural
The feminine definite articles begin with but are otherwise identical (, , , ). With nouns longer than one syllable and with nouns that begin with or , reduced forms of the definite article are used which do not distinguish between cases, but maintain gender distinctions. In some dialects (e.g. that described by Wedekind, Wedekind, and Musa for Port Sudan) the reduced forms maintain number distinctions; in others (e.g. that described by Vanhove and Roper for Sinkat) they do not.
Possession Possessive relationships are shown through a genitive suffix (singular possessed) or (plural possessed) which attaches to the possessing noun. If the possessing noun is feminine, the genitive marker will begin with ; if the possessed is feminine, the suffix will end with . When the suffix does not end with the feminine marker , it reduces to , whether singular or plural (that is, the singular/plural distinction is only marked for feminine possessa). Because this suffix adds a syllable to the noun, full forms of articles cannot be used; thus, the article on the noun itself does not indicate case. However, agreeing adjectives will be marked for oblique case. No article or indefinite suffix may be applied to the possessed noun. The possessed noun follows the possessor. Examples:
'the man's friend (m)' 'the man's friend (f)' 'the woman's friend (m)' 'the woman's friend (f)' 'the men's friends (f)' (The noun 'man' has the suppletive plural 'men'; 'friend' has the shortened plural 'friends'.)
Postpositions follow nouns in the genitive. Examples:
'The man came toward the chief/elder.' (: 'toward') 'The boy is with the girls.' (: 'with')
Adjectives Adjectives follow the nominal heads of noun phrases. They agree in gender, number, case, and definiteness, and carry case and definiteness markers of the same form as nouns.
Copula Clauses may be composed of two noun phrases or a noun phrase and a predicative adjective followed by a copular clitic. The copula agrees in person, gender, and number with the copula complement (the second term), but the first- and third-person forms are identical. The copular subject will be in the nominative case, the copular complement in the oblique. Oblique becomes before . Copular complements that end in a vowel will employ an epenthetic between the final vowel and any vowel-initial copular clitic.
+ Masculine Feminine 1stperson singular plural 2ndperson singular plural 3rdperson singular plural
Examples:
"I am strong." "You are strong." "He is a lion." "This is a five-piastre piece." "We are Amirab." "They are the donkeys." "They are the thieves."
Verbs Beja verbs have two different types, first noted by Almkvist: "strong verbs," which conjugate with both prefixes and suffixes and have several principal parts; and "weak verbs," which conjugate with suffixes only and which have a fixed root. Verbs conjugate for a number of tense, aspect, modality, and polarity variations, which have been given different names by different linguists:
Roper Wedekind, Wedekind, and Musa Vanhove Conditional Past Continuous Aorist Past Indicative Past Perfective Present Indicative Present Imperfective Future Indicative Future Future Intentional Desiderative Imperative Imperative Imperative Optative Jussive Optative Potential