Forthcoming: A dictionary and grammatical sketch of Beja (Sudan)

Martine Vanhove, Mohamed-Tahir Hamid-Ahmed

Synopsis

This book contains a Beja-English-French dictionary, the first one to focus on the central and southern varieties of this Cushitic language as spoken in eastern Sudan, an appendix of clitics and affixes, an English-Beja reversal index, a French-Beja reversal index, and a grammatical sketch. The dictionary and its appendices contain over 8,000 entries and sub-entries. It is the largest dictionary on this language, and the sole one which is systematically organized by roots (the alphabetical order considers consonants and vowels), with all their variants and derived forms (also cross-referenced alphabetically). Lemmas contain the base form and all the derived forms of a root with all relevant information about parts of speech, verb categories, gender, source of loan words, etymologies, morphological, grammatical, sociolinguistic, encyclopaedic information, synonyms, antonyms, and examples. Literal translations of compound words and examples are provided when needed. Stress, tone, and phonetic forms are only mentioned when unpredictable from the rules mentioned in the grammatical sketch. The grammatical sketch contains sections on phonology, morphology (including compounds, evaluative morphology, and interjections), TAM (including verbal complex predicates), elements of syntax (including complex utterances), and information and discourse structures. This work is mainly intended as a resource for linguists, in particular specialist of Cushitic and Semitic languages, and can also serve as a resource for speakers and learners of Beja.

Biographies

Martine Vanhove

Martine Vanhove is a CNRS emeritus research fellow at Llacan (Langage, Langues et Cultures d’Afrique), a research unit affiliated with the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INaLCO) and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE) in Paris. Her domains of research include Beja, dialectal Arabic varieties, and Maltese, all belonging to the Afro-Asiatic phylum, syntax, information structure, grammaticalization, lexical and semantic typology, corpus linguistics, language contact and areal linguistics.

Mohamed-Tahir Hamid-Ahmed

Mohamed-Tahir Hamid-Ahmed is an anthropologist and native speaker of Beja, professor of French as a foreign language at the Sudan University of Sciences and Technology in Khartoum (Sudan). During the completion of the dictionary in 2023-2024, he was also affiliated at Llacan, thanks to funding from the CNRS and PAUSE (Programme national d’accueil en urgence des scientifiques et artistes en exil). He is the author of a book on Beja poetry, and his main areas of research range from the pedagogy of teaching French, to Beja lexicography, language contact with Arabic, oral literature and proverbs.

book cover

Published

May 13, 2026
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Cite as
Vanhove, Martine & Hamid-Ahmed, Mohamed-Tahir. Forthcoming. A dictionary and grammatical sketch of Beja (Sudan). (African Language Grammars and Dictionaries). Berlin: Language Science Press.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.