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. In 2017 there were 2,220,000 Beja speakers in Sudan according to Ethnologue. In 1993 there were 77,000 speakers of Beja in Egypt, current number of speakers today in Egypt is unknown. As of 2020 there are an estimated 201,000 Beja speakers in Eritrea. The total number of speakers in all three countries is 2,498,000.
Name
The name Beja, derived from , is most common in English-language literature. Native speakers use the term (indefinite) or (definite).
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) *C' → 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 Blemmye, 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
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.
Beja has pitch accent.