Ababdaball

Ababdaball is an ethnic group from eastern Egypt and the Sudan. Historically, most were nomads living in the area between the Nile and the Red Sea, with some settling along the trade route linking Korosko with Abu Hamadball. Numerous traveler accounts from the nineteenth century report that some of the Ababda people at that time still spoke Beja or a language of their own, hence many secondary sources consider Ababdaball to be a Beja subtribeball. Most of the Ababda people now speak Arabic and identify as an Arab tribeball from Hejazball

Origin and History
Two Ababde men in 1848

Ababda tribal origin narratives identify them as an Arab people from the Hijaz, descended from Zubayr ibn al-Awam (possibly through his son Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr) following the Muslim conquest of Egypt.

Many published sources in Western languages identify the Ababda as a subtribe of the Beja, or as descendants of speakers of a Cushitic language.

Further information: Egyptian invasion of Sudan 1820-24 § Invasion of Nubia

Arabic
Ababda bedouin in Wadi um Ghamis (1961)

Today, virtually all Ababda communities speak Arabic. There is no oral tradition of having spoken any other language prior to Arabic, in keeping with Ababda Arab origin narratives.

In a 1996 study, Rudolf de Jong found that the Ababda dialect of Arabic was quite similar to that of the Shukriya people of the Sudan, and concluded that it was an extension of the northern Sudanese dialect area.

Alfred von Kremer reported in 1863 that the Ababda had developed an Arabic-based thieves' cant that only they understood.

Ababda or Beja Language
The Ababda may have spoken a dialect of Beja before Arabic, but if so, nothing of that dialect is preserved today. John Lewis Burckhardt reported that in 1813 those Ababda who co-resided with the Bishari tribe spoke Beja. Alfred von Kremer believed them to be native Beja-speakers and was told that the Ababda were bilingual in Arabic, which they spoke with a heavy accent. Those who resided with the Nubians spoke Kenzi. Robert Hartmann, who visited the country in 1859/60, noted that the vast majority of the Ababda now spoke Arabic. However, in the past they used to speak a Beja dialect that was now, as he was told, solely restricted to a few nomadic families roaming the Eastern Desert. He believed that they abandoned their language in favour of Arabic due to their close contact with other arabophone tribes. The Swedish linguist Herman Almkvist, writing in 1881, counted the Ababda to the Beja and noted that most had discarded the Beja language, supposedly identical to the Bishari dialect, in favour of Arabic, although "quite a lot" were still capable of understanding and even talking Beja. Bishari informants told him that in the past, the Bishari and Ababda were the same people. Joseph Russegger, who visited the country around 1840, noted that the Ababde spoke their own language, although he added that it was heavily mixed with Arabic. He believed it to be a "Nubian Bedouin" language and implied that this language, and the Ababde customs and appearance in general, is similar to that of the Bishari. Traveller Bayard Taylor wrote in 1856 that the Ababda spoke a language different from that of the Bishari, although it "probably sprang from the same original stock." In the 1820's Eduard Rüppell briefly stated that the Ababda spoke their own, seemingly non-Arabic language. Similar was written by Pierre Trémaux after his journey in Sudan in the late 1840's.