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Arabic in Contact
Edited by Stefano Manfredi and Mauro Tosco
[Studies in Arabic Linguistics 6] 2018
► pp. 275–294

Mountains do not meet, but men do

Music and sociocultural networks among Arabic creole-speaking communities across East Africa

| Osaka University

Linguists have long assumed that Juba Arabic and Nubi, the two Arabic creoles spoken in East Africa, have been cut off from each other since their “linguistic divergence” in the 1880s. This historical interpretation, however, overlooks sociocultural (including linguistic) interactions between the Nubi-speaking communities of Uganda and Kenya and a minor Juba Arabic-speaking community in South Sudan called Malakiyyans since the 1880s down to the present day. This paper aims at exploring their history and the way in which they have interacted with each other to redefine their identity, focusing on the musical tradition called dolúka and dirêr.

Keywords: Nubi, Juba Arabic, creole, ethnomusicology, transnationality
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Questioning the linguistic divergence of Arabic creoles
  • 2.History of the Arabic creole-speaking communities in East Africa
    • 2.1Military slavery and musical traditions in 19th-century Sudan
    • 2.2History and traditions of Nubis and Malakiyyans
    • 2.3 Social interactions of Nubis and Malakiyyans across East Africa
  • 3.Performing identity through dolúka and dirêr
    • 3.1Organization of dolúka and dirêr
    • 3.2Lyrics and languages of dolúka and dirêr songs
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgment
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 10 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sal.6.14nak
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