In the 1820s Eduard Rüppell briefly stated that the Ababda spoke their own, seemingly non-Arabic language. A similar opinion was written by Pierre Trémaux after his journey in Sudan in the late 1840s. At the turn of the 19th century, during the French campaign in Egypt and Syria, the engineer Dubois-Aymé wrote that the Ababda understood Arabic, but still spoke a language of their own.