"The endangered status of Uncunwee and other Kordofan Nubian dialects is widely recognized by their speakers and linguists alike. One indicator of this status is the dwindling numbers of mother-tongue speakers... Especially in the Nuba Mountains Uncu area, if not in the Uncu communities in Khartoum, the elder generation has acquired Uncunwee as a first language but their children tend to grow up with Arabic as a first language. Uncunwee is used in family and community domains in the Nuba Mountains, but not as a language of instruction in the schools or as a lingua franca outside of the Kordofan Nubian group... Perhaps the most serious threat to the existence of Uncunwee lies in the area of first language acquisition. Even in the remotest villages, there is now a growing trend among young mothers, themselves schooled in Arabic, to raise their children as monolingual Arabic speakers."

"Arabic, as the result of a long-standing policy of Arabization by the Khartoum government, dominates in these areas... Even in the remotest villages, there is now a growing trend among young mothers, themselves schooled in Arabic, to raise their children as monolingual Arabic speakers. This behavior seems to be based on a shared ingrained and perhaps subconscious belief among younger adults that Uncunwee is a tribal language that is inferior to Arabic, thus marking its users with a social stigma."

"Since Uncunwee is a non-written language, there has also been no formal teaching of the language or the culture in the schools."

"We have noticed a trend in even the remotest Uncu villages of young mothers raising their children as monolingual Arabic speakers. Given this and other previously-mentioned conditions, it is appears that Uncunwee is in serious danger of becoming moribund, where no Uncu children will be native speakers of the language, and of moving in the end stage of language obsolescence."

"Due to heavy pressure from Arabic, the lingua franca and only official language in Sudan, the indigenous languages, which have low status and lack official support, are severely threatened by extinction (Mugaddam & Dimmendaal 2006). In the ethnolinguistically highly heterogeneous Nuba Mountains there are several factors that work to spread the use of Arabic at the expense of Uncunwee and other indigenous languages. Perhaps the two most powerful causes of this shift are the high percentage of ethnically and linguistically mixed marriages and the high degree of labor and forced migration to cities such as Khartoum and Cairo. The language shift from Uncunwee to Arabic is attested both by the high percentage of children whose first language is Arabic rather than Uncunwee and by the dwindling number of monolingual Uncunwee speakers (Patriarchi & Rottland 1995)."