Department of Linguistics, University of New Mexico, The United States of America
The United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors is a Pan-African identitarian spiritual movement spread chiefly across North America and the Caribbean. From the sect’s genesis in the 1970s as an offshoot of mainline Black Islam, the Nuwaubians studied Arabic both for spiritual purposes and in hopes of preventing outsiders from knowing their designs. They hired language teachers from Sudan and other Sahelian countries while simultaneously interacting with Black Hebrew Israelites, resulting in strong initial influences from both Sudanese Arabic and Hebrew in Nuwaubian language use. However, the 1990s brought great changes to the Nuwaubians’ beliefs and way of life, and with this came tremendous developments in their language as well. As the Nuwaubians shifted to communal living in an isolated pyramid compound and replaced their patchwork quasi-Islamic faith with one rooted more in pharaonic mythology, their language also adopted features from Egyptian. The anonymous Nuwaubian language committee rapidly discarded features of African Arabic and others from their language – first in favor of Standard Arabic, and then instead for a uniquely reconstructed form of the ancient Egyptian lexicon with a strong English substratum. This project surveys forty years of Nuwaubian literature and language use to identify the lexical, phonological and morphosyntactic changes involved in the processes of deregionalization, Egyptification and substrate creation at play in the Nuwaubian language’s continued development parallel to religious shifts within the community. Noteworthy trends on this timeline include movement away from Sudanese Arabic and Mahdiism, a great subsequent shift towards Egyptian influence at all levels of language and belief followed by a smaller step back, and pragmatically minded increases in English influence in Nuwaupic morphosyntax.
Keywords: Sudanese, Egyptianization, Language Change, Religion, Black languages
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The 11th International Conference on Languages, Linguistics, Translation and Literature (WWW.TLLL.IR), 1-2 February 2026, Ahwaz.
