"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)."