Speakers of Beja call their language To Bedawie, and both names are used for this language of north-eastern Africa. It is usually classified as the sole member of the Northern Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family, though some linguists treat it as a branch of its own. Speakers live mainly in eastern Sudan between the Nile and the Red Sea, with smaller numbers in northern Eritrea and southern Egypt. Estimates commonly put the total at somewhere between 1 and 2 million. Dialect names follow the main Beja groups, including Hadendoa, Bisharin and Hadareb. Beja has long been primarily an oral language; written materials exist in both Arabic and Latin scripts, but no single standard spelling has taken hold, and many speakers are bilingual in Arabic or Tigre.
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