[2] The name Beja, derived from Arabic: بجا, romanized: bijā, is most common in English-language literature.

The characteristics of Beja that differ from those of other Cushitic languages are likewise generally acknowledged as normal branch variation.

[5] The identification of Beja as an independent branch of Cushitic dates to the work of Enrico Cerulli between 1925 and 1951.

[6] Due to Beja's linguistic innovations, Robert Hetzron argued that it constituted an independent branch of Afroasiatic.

[7] Hetzron's proposal was generally rejected by other linguists, and Cerulli's identification of Beja as the sole member of a North Cushitic branch remains standard today across otherwise divergent proposals for the internal relations of the Cushitic language family.

Helmut Satzinger has identified the names found on several third century CE ostraca (potsherds) from the Eastern Desert as likely Blemmyan, representing a form of Old Beja.

[11] Nubiologist Gerald Browne, Egyptologist Helmut Satzinger, and Cushiticist Klaus Wedekind believed that an ostracon discovered in a monastery in Saqqarah also represents the Old Beja language.

[17] The Roman orthography below is that used by the Eritrean government and was used in a literacy program at Red Sea University in Port Sudan from 2010 to 2013.

Three Arabic orthographies have seen limited use: The first below was that used by the now defunct Website Sakanab; the second was devised by Muhammad Adaroob Muhammad and used in his translation of E.M. Roper's Beja lexicon; the third was devised by Mahmud Ahmad Abu Bikr Ooriib, and was employed briefly at Red Sea University in 2019.

Long /aː/ is written with 'alif (ا) preceded by fatḥah, or alif maddah (آ) when word-initial.

[23] Beja nouns and adjectives have two genders: masculine and feminine, two numbers: singular and plural, two cases: nominative and oblique, and may be definite, indefinite, or in construct state.

Verbs conjugate for a number of tense, aspect, modality, and polarity variations, which have been given different names by different linguists: (Roper analyzes additional subjunctive forms where Wedekind, Wedekind, and Musa, and Vanhove see a conditional particle.)

Numerous serial verb constructions exist which connote different aspectual and potential meanings.

For weak verbs, the deverbal noun is formed by a suffix -ti attached to the imperative root (see above).

[33] A further derived form is a suffix -aa attached to the citation root, and then followed by -b for masculine nouns and -t for feminine.

[41] In addition to the future, Bidhaawyeet has a similar form expressing desire to undertake an act or intention to do so.

The citation root takes a suffix -a for all persons, genders, and numbers, and is followed by a present tense/imperfective conjugated form of the verb diya "to say", as the future is.

For strong verbs, the first person is based on the past/perfective stem, and the persons are based on the future stem; no negative jussive is given: They give various examples of the jussive with translations into English, in order to give a sense of the meaning: Vanhove identifies a complex "potential" form composed of a nominalizing suffix -at followed by a present/imperfective reduced conjugation of the verb m'a 'come' (eeya in the non-reduced present/imperfective).

"[44] Examples below, with the potential verbs in bold: Additionally, she recognizes an optative with positive and negative polarity.

In some dialects, the final -aay of most forms of the weak negative is a short -ay: Vanhove gives no explanation for the use of the optative positive.

This was analogous to the percentage of common lexical terms that was calculated for certain other Cushitic languages, such as Afar and Oromo.

Václav Blažek (1997) conducted a more comprehensive glottochronological examination of languages and data.

[47] Andrzej Zaborski has noted close parallels between Beja and Egyptian vocabulary.

[48] The only independent Beja dictionary yet printed is Leo Reinisch's 1895 Wörterbuch der Beḍauye-Sprache.

Klaus and Charlotte Wedekind and Abuzeinab Musa's 2007 A Learner's Grammar of Beja (East Sudan) comes with a CD which contains a roughly 7,000-word lexicon, composed mostly of one-word glosses.

[50] The Beja scholar Muhammed Adarob Ohaj produced a Beja-Arabic dictionary as his masters thesis in 1972.

[52] Beja has an extensive oral tradition, including multiple poetic genres.

A well-known epic is the story of the hero Mhamuud Oofaash, portions of which have appeared in various publications by Klaus Wedekind.

[54] In the 1960s and '70s, the Beja intellectual Muhammed Adarob Ohaj collected oral recordings of poetic and narrative material which are in the University of Khartoum Institute of African and Asian Studies Sound Archives.

Didier Morin and Mohamed-Tahir Hamid Ahmed have used these, in addition to their own collections, for multiple academic publications in French on Beja poetics[citation needed].