Midob language


Midob is the language of the Midob people of North Darfur, Sudan. It is one of the Nubian languages, which are part of the Nilo-Saharan language phylum.
Apart from in their homeland of Malha, North Darfur, Midob speakers also live in the Khartoum area and Jezirat Aba. The Midob people call their language tìd-n-áal, literally "mouth of the Midob", and themselves tìddí, tìd. There are an estimated 50,000 Midob speakers in two main dialects, Urrti and Kaageddi. Rilly lists the dialects of Urrti, Shalkota, and Torti. Only Urrti has been described in detail.
Recent research on Midob has been done by Thelwall and Werner. Both studies concerned the Urrti dialect.

Phonology

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

Vowels

Note: All vowels occur long and short. The mid central vowel 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.
àadíwe
áadístick
àadìlight

náyou
nàhim, her

Grammar

Midob is an agglutinative language, like the other Nubian languages. The default word order is SOV.

Verb

The verbs consist of:
The stem is not altered. Extensions modify or add meaning to the verb like negation, intention, affirmation, completed action, plurality of subject–object or action, durative, habitual and sometimes can be combined.

Tense and aspect

Midob has two basic tenses plus Intentional. There are sets of suffixes for indicative, subjunctive and two question forms.
Sets of personal endings:
IndicativeSubjunctiveQuestion1Question2
Perfectxxxx
Continuous xxxx
Intentionalx---