Egyptian playwrights let Nubian characters speak only in mangled dialect, never their own

Evidence

If some sympathy between Abü Rida and Sanüa's audience was evoked, then Abü Rida is only a mouthpiece, but one who does not speak directly about the difficult social position of Nubians in late-nineteenth-century Egypt. In other ways, Nubians in Sanüa’s plays are not permitted to speak on their own terms. Nowhere does the author, a linguist, seem to have studied their dialect as carefully as he did that of Upper Egyptians and the Lebanese. His knowledge of Turkish, which he displays continuously as the rulers of Egypt mangle Arabic, reveals an impressive awareness of Turkish conjugations. The Nubians speak a bastardized Cairene dialect, and even their attempts at love and its poetry raise the eyebrows of Sanü`a’s Egyptians. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 381

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the linguistic-caste pattern of colonial writing generally; a linguist author who studied Upper Egyptian and Lebanese dialects carefully but not Nubian is a telling internal hierarchy worth connecting to the reader’s colonial-tools lens.