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Tamasheq
Tamashek or Tamasheq is a variety of Tuareg, a Berber macro-language widely spoken by nomadic tribes across North Africa in Algeria, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. Tamasheq is one of the three main varieties of Tuareg, the others being Tamajaq and Tamahaq. Tamashek is spoken mostly in Mali, especially in its central region including Timbuktu, Kidal, and Gao. It is also spoken by a smaller population in Burkina Faso. As of 2014, approximately 500,000 people speak Tamashek, 378,000 of whom are Malian. The livelihood of the Tuareg people has been under threat in the last century, due to climate change and a series of political conflicts, notably the Arab-Tuareg rebellion of 1990–1995 in Mali which resulted in ethnic cleansing of the Tuareg in the form of reprisal killings and exile. Tamashek is currently classified as a developing language (5), partly due to the Malian government's active promotion of the language; it is currently taught in public education, from primary sch ...
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Tuareg Languages
The Tuareg () languages constitute a group of closely related Berber languages and dialects. They are spoken by the Tuareg Berbers in large parts of Mali, Niger, Algeria, Libya and Burkina Faso, with a few speakers, the ''Kinnin'', in Chad. Description Tuareg dialects belong to the South Berber group and are sometimes regarded as a single language (as for instance by Karl-Gottfried Prasse). They are distinguished mainly by a few sound shifts (notably affecting the pronunciation of original ''z'' and ''h''). The Tuareg varieties are unusually conservative in some respects; they retain two short vowels where Northern-Berber languages have one or none, and have a much lower proportion of Arabic loanwords than most Berber languages. The Tuareg languages are traditionally written in the indigenous Tifinagh alphabet. However, the Arabic script is commonly used in some areas (and has been since medieval times), while the Latin script is official in Mali and Niger. Subclassification *No ...
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Tuareg People
The Tuareg people (; also spelled Twareg or Touareg; endonym: ''Imuhaɣ/Imušaɣ/Imašeɣăn/Imajeɣăn'') are a large Berber ethnic group that principally inhabit the Sahara in a vast area stretching from far southwestern Libya to southern Algeria, Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso. Traditionally nomadic pastoralists, small groups of Tuareg are also found in northern Nigeria. The Tuareg speak languages of the same name (also known as ''Tamasheq''), which belong to the Berber branch of the Afroasiatic family. The Tuaregs have been called the "blue people" for the indigo dye coloured clothes they traditionally wear and which stains their skin. They are a semi-nomadic people who practice Islam, and are descended from the indigenous Berber communities of Northern Africa, which have been described as a mosaic of local Northern African (Taforalt), Middle Eastern, European (Early European Farmers), and Sub-Saharan African-related ancestries, prior to the Arab expansion. Tuareg peopl ...
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Berber Languages
The Berber languages, also known as the Amazigh languages or Tamazight,, ber, label=Tuareg Tifinagh, ⵜⵎⵣⵗⵜ, ) are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They comprise a group of closely related languages spoken by Berber communities, who are indigenous to North Africa.Hayward, Richard J., chapter ''Afroasiatic'' in Heine, Bernd & Nurse, Derek, editors, ''African Languages: An Introduction'' Cambridge 2000. . The languages were traditionally written with the ancient Libyco-Berber script, which now exists in the form of Tifinagh. Today, they may also be written in the Berber Latin alphabet or the Arabic script, with Latin being the most pervasive. Berber languages are spoken by large populations of Morocco, Algeria and Libya, by smaller populations of Tunisia, northern Mali, western and northern Niger, northern Burkina Faso and Mauritania and in the Siwa Oasis of Egypt. Large Berber-speaking migrant communities, today numbering about 4 million, have been livin ...
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Mali
Mali (; ), officially the Republic of Mali,, , ff, 𞤈𞤫𞤲𞥆𞤣𞤢𞥄𞤲𞤣𞤭 𞤃𞤢𞥄𞤤𞤭, Renndaandi Maali, italics=no, ar, جمهورية مالي, Jumhūriyyāt Mālī is a landlocked country in West Africa. Mali is the eighth-largest country in Africa, with an area of over . The population of Mali is  million. 67% of its population was estimated to be under the age of 25 in 2017. Its capital and largest city is Bamako. The sovereign state of Mali consists of eight regions and its borders on the north reach deep into the middle of the Sahara Desert. The country's southern part is in the Sudanian savanna, where the majority of inhabitants live, and both the Niger and Senegal rivers pass through. The country's economy centres on agriculture and mining. One of Mali's most prominent natural resources is gold, and the country is the third largest producer of gold on the African continent. It also exports salt. Present-day Mali was once part of t ...
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Burkina Faso
Burkina Faso (, ; , ff, 𞤄𞤵𞤪𞤳𞤭𞤲𞤢 𞤊𞤢𞤧𞤮, italic=no) is a landlocked country in West Africa with an area of , bordered by Mali to the northwest, Niger to the northeast, Benin to the southeast, Togo and Ghana to the south, and the Ivory Coast to the southwest. It has a population of 20,321,378. Previously called Republic of Upper Volta (1958–1984), it was renamed Burkina Faso by President Thomas Sankara. Its citizens are known as ''Burkinabè'' ( ), and its capital and largest city is Ouagadougou. The largest ethnic group in Burkina Faso is the Mossi people, who settled the area in the 11th and 13th centuries. They established powerful kingdoms such as the Ouagadougou, Tenkodogo, and Yatenga. In 1896, it was colonized by the French as part of French West Africa; in 1958, Upper Volta became a self-governing colony within the French Community. In 1960, it gained full independence with Maurice Yaméogo as president. Throughout the decades post in ...
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Kidal
Kidal ( Tuareg Berber: ⴾⴸⵍ, KDL, Kidal) is a town and commune in the desert region of northern Mali. The town lies northeast of Gao and is the capital of the Kidal Cercle and the Kidal Region. The commune has an area of about and includes the town of Kidal and 31 other settlements. History On 30 March 2012, Kidal and its military base were captured by the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad as part of the Tuareg rebellion for the independence of Azawad. A spokesman for the Malian military junta said "To preserve the life of the people of Kidal, the military command decided not to prolong the battle". Gao and Timbuktu were captured within the next 48 hours, and on 6 April, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad declared the independence of Azawad from Mali. In the course of the conflict the MNLA lost their control to Islamist militias. On 30 January 2013 French and Malian forces moved into the town to bring it back under government control. On 14 ...
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Niger
) , official_languages = , languages_type = National languagesRépublique du Niger, "Loi n° 2001-037 du 31 décembre 2001 fixant les modalités de promotion et de développement des langues nationales." L'aménagement linguistique dans le monde
(accessed 21 September 2016)
, languages = , religion_ref = , religion_year = 2012 , religion = , demonym = Nigerien , capital = , coordinates ...
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Tamahaq Language
Tamahaq (''Tahaggart Tamahaq'', ''Tamahaq Tahaggart'') is the only known Northern Tuareg language, spoken in Algeria, western Libya and northern Niger. It varies little from the Southern Tuareg languages of the Aïr Mountains, Azawagh and Adagh. The differences mostly consist of sound substitutions, such as ''Tamahaq'' instead of ''Tamajaq'' or ''Tamasheq''. Varieties There are three main varieties of Tamahaq: *''Tahaggart'', spoken around the Ahaggar Mountains in southern Algeria by the Kel Ahaggar confederation *''Ajjer'', spoken by the Kel Ajjer confederation *''Ghat'', spoken around Djanet in southeast Algeria and Ghat Ghat, a term used in the Indian subcontinent, depending on the context could refer either to a range of stepped hills with valleys (ghati in Hindi), such as the Eastern Ghats and Western Ghats; or the series of steps leading down to a body of ... in Libya. According to Blench (2006), Tahaggart and Ghat are distinct Tuareg languages. References ...
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Palatal Consonant
Palatals are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate (the middle part of the roof of the mouth). Consonants with the tip of the tongue curled back against the palate are called retroflex. Characteristics The most common type of palatal consonant is the extremely common approximant , which ranks as among the ten most common sounds in the world's languages. The nasal is also common, occurring in around 35 percent of the world's languages, in most of which its equivalent obstruent is not the stop , but the affricate . Only a few languages in northern Eurasia, the Americas and central Africa contrast palatal stops with postalveolar affricates—as in Hungarian, Czech, Latvian, Macedonian, Slovak, Turkish and Albanian. Consonants with other primary articulations may be palatalized, that is, accompanied by the raising of the tongue surface towards the hard palate. For example, English (spelled ''sh'') has such a palatal component ...
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Velar Consonant
Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth (known also as the velum). Since the velar region of the roof of the mouth is relatively extensive and the movements of the dorsum are not very precise, velars easily undergo assimilation, shifting their articulation back or to the front depending on the quality of adjacent vowels. They often become automatically ''fronted'', that is partly or completely palatal before a following front vowel, and ''retracted'', that is partly or completely uvular before back vowels. Palatalised velars (like English in ''keen'' or ''cube'') are sometimes referred to as palatovelars. Many languages also have labialized velars, such as , in which the articulation is accompanied by rounding of the lips. There are also labial–velar consonants, which are doubly articulated at the velum and at the lips, such as . This distinction disappears with the approx ...
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Uvular Consonant
Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be stops, fricatives, nasals, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not provide a separate symbol for the approximant, and the symbol for the voiced fricative is used instead. Uvular affricates can certainly be made but are rare: they occur in some southern High-German dialects, as well as in a few African and Native American languages. (Ejective uvular affricates occur as realizations of uvular stops in Lillooet, Kazakh, or as allophonic realizations of the ejective uvular fricative in Georgian.) Uvular consonants are typically incompatible with advanced tongue root, and they often cause retraction of neighboring vowels. Uvular consonants in IPA The uvular consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are: , being/existence , - !χʼ , uvular ejective fricative , Tlingit , x̱'aan , ''χʼàː ...
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Laryngeal Consonant
Laryngeal consonants (a term often used interchangeably with guttural consonants) are consonants with their primary articulation in the larynx. The laryngeal consonants comprise the pharyngeal consonants (including the epiglottals), the glottal consonants, and for some languages uvular consonants.Scott Moisik, Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins, & John H. Esling (2012"The Epilaryngeal Articulator: A New Conceptual Tool for Understanding Lingual-Laryngeal Contrasts"/ref> The term ''laryngeal'' is often taken to be synonymous with ''glottal'', but the larynx consists of more than just the glottis (vocal folds): it also includes the epiglottis and aryepiglottic folds. In a broad sense, therefore, laryngeal articulations include the radical consonants, which involve the root of the tongue. The diversity of sounds produced in the larynx is the subject of ongoing research, and the terminology is evolving. The term ''laryngeal consonant'' is also used for laryngealized consonants articulated in ...
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