Gadal language

Gadal
Tagdal-Tabarog
Tihishit
Native to Niger
Ethnicity Igalan, Iberogan
Native speakers
27,000 (2000)[1]
Dialects
  • Gadal (Tagdal)
  • Barog (Tabarog)
Tifinagh
Language codes
ISO 639-3 tda
Glottolog tagd1238[2]

Location of Songhay languages[3]

Northwest Songhay:

  Tagdal

Eastern Songhay:

  Dendi
Gadal
Person Agdal
People Igdalan
Language Tagdal
Barog
People Iberogan
Language Tabarog

The Gadal language (Tuareg name: Tagdal) is a mixed Northern Songhay language of central Niger. Ethnologue considers it a "mixed Berber–Songhay language",[1][4] while other researchers consider it Northern Songhay.[5] About half of its daily vocabulary is Tuareg, and three quarters overall. There are two dialects: Tagdal proper, spoken by the Igdalen people, pastoralists who inhabit a region to the east along the Niger border to Tahoua in Niger,[4] and Tabarog, spoken by the Iberogan people of the Azawagh valley on the Niger–Mali border.

Nicolaï (1981) uses the name Tihishit as a cover term. Rueck & Christiansen[6] say that

...the Igdalen and the Iberogan have for many purposes been treated as one group, and their speech forms are closely related. Nicolaï uses "tihishit" as a common designator for these two speech forms...; however, this term is ambiguous. "Tihishit" is a term of Tamajaq origin meaning "the language of the blacks". The Igdalen and Iberogan used it to refer to all Northern Songhay speech forms.[5]

Meanwhile, the Iberogan sometimes refer to their language as Tagdal.

References

  1. 1 2 Gadal at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016). "Tagdal". Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  3. This map is based on classification from Glottolog and data from Ethnologue.
  4. 1 2 CM Benítez-Torres. Inflectional vs. Derivational Morphology in Tagdal: A Mixed Language In Selected Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, ed. (2009)
  5. 1 2 Michael J Rueck; Niels Christiansen. Northern Songhay languages in Mali and Niger, a sociolinguistic survey. Summer Institute of Linguistics (1999).
  6. Catherine Taine-Cheikh. Les langues parlées au sud Sahara et au nord Sahel. De l'Atlantique à l'Ennedi (Catalogue de l'exposition « Sahara-Sahel »), Centre Culturel Français d'Abidjan (Ed.) (1989) 155-173
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