Bedawiyet
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Locations in Egypt and Eritrea
Locations should be expanded to include Red Sea Governorate in Egypt: Bedawiyet is spoken in the Halaib Triangle, which the Sudan claims as part of its Red Sea State and Egypt claims as part of its Red Sea Governorate. The Triangle is currently administered by Egypt. Shallaateen, however, is a major Bedawiyet-speaking town right on the edge of the Halaib Triangle. Both states recognize it as part of Egypt, and it is thus part of Red Sea Governorate.
I have been unable to find site-specific data on the use of Bedawiyet in Eritrea post-independence. Certainly, however, Eritrea should be mentioned in the Location section. The Eritrean Ministry of Education has developed literacy materials in Bedawiyet with the participation of the late SIL researcher Klaus Wedekind. Wedekind and Mahmud Mohammed's comparative dialect study on Bedawiyet (2009, presented at the World Congress of African Linguistics in Cologne) draws on the language as spoken in Täsänäy in Gaš-Barka Region of Eritrea. Anecdotally, it appears that this is the region of Eritrea in which the only significant concentration of Bedawiyet-speakers lives, but I can't substantiate that with a published source.
We will update the locations for Bedawiyet [bej] in Egypt and Eritrea, for inclusion in the next edition of the Ethnologue.
"Bedawiyet" Phonological Typology
A couple additions for Bedawiyet typology:
Phonologically, Bedawiyet has pitch stress (Wedekind, Wedekind, and Abuzeinab 2007, 12; Vanhove 2017, 19–21 does not use this terminology but describes the same phenomenon).
The major sources do not agree on the number of phonemes: Wedekind, Wedekind, and Abuzeinab recognise 22 consonants and 5 vowels; Vanhove recognizes 21 consonants and 5 vowel qualities (she gives the number of vowels as 7, but this is because she counts short and long variants separately). The difference is a matter of interpretation of facts, rather than the facts themselves: If we ignore consonants employed in Arabic words, both sources agree on the same 21 basic consonants. (Wedekind, Wedekind, and Abuzeinab recognize /x/ in Arabic words interpolated into Bidhaawyeet sentences; Vanhove recognizes but does not count /z/ in the same situation. In my own field research, I have heard both. /x/ is often realised as [h] or [k], /z/ as [d], but both [x] & [z] frequently appear in the speech of fluent bilinguals).
Wedekind, Klaus, Charlotte Wedekind, and Abuzeinab Musa. A Learner's Grammar of Beja (East Sudan). Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2007.
Vanhove, Martine. Le Bedja. Leuven: Peeters, 2017.
We will update the linguistic typology information in the Ethnologue for Bedawiyet [bej], to be included in the next edition of the Ethnologue.