Zaghawa is a Saharan language spoken by the

Zaghawa people The Zaghawa people, also called Beri or Zakhawa, are a Sahelian Muslim ethnic group primarily residing in Fezzan North-eastern Chad, and western Sudan, including Darfur. Zaghawas speak the Zaghawa language, which is an eastern Saharan lang ...

of east-central

Chad Chad (; ar, تشاد , ; french: Tchad, ), officially the Republic of Chad, '; ) is a landlocked country at the crossroads of North and Central Africa. It is bordered by Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, the Central African Republic ...

(in the

Sahel The Sahel (; ar, ساحل ' , "coast, shore") is a region in North Africa. It is defined as the ecoclimatic and biogeographic realm of transition between the Sahara to the north and the Sudanian savanna to the south. Having a hot semi-arid cli ...

) and northwestern

Sudan Sudan ( or ; ar, السودان, as-Sūdān, officially the Republic of the Sudan ( ar, جمهورية السودان, link=no, Jumhūriyyat as-Sūdān), is a country in Northeast Africa. It shares borders with the Central African Republic t ...

(

Darfur Darfur ( ; ar, دار فور, Dār Fūr, lit=Realm of the Fur) is a region of western Sudan. ''Dār'' is an Arabic word meaning "home f – the region was named Dardaju ( ar, دار داجو, Dār Dājū, links=no) while ruled by the Daju ...

). The people who speak this language call it Beria, from ''Beri'', the

endonym An endonym (from Greek: , 'inner' + , 'name'; also known as autonym) is a common, ''native'' name for a geographical place, group of people, individual person, language or dialect, meaning that it is used inside that particular place, group, ...

of the Zaghawa people, and ''a'', Zaghawa for "mouth". It has been estimated that there are between 750,000 native Zaghawa speakers, who primarily live in Chad and the Darfur region of Sudan.

Dialects

Zaghawa clans are:Anonby, Erik John and Johnson, Eric. 2001. ''A sociolinguistic survey of the Zaghawa (Beria) of Chad and Sudan'', p.9. Moursal-N'Djaména, Chad: Association SIL Tchad. *Beria (Arabic: ''Zaghawa'') *Tuba (Arabic: ''Bideyat''): Biria, Brogat *Kube (Arabic: ''Zaghawa''): Dirong, Guruf, Kube, Kapka *Wegi (Arabic: ''Twer'') Zaghawa dialects, which do not always correspond to clan divisions, are:

Phonology

Vowels

Zaghawa has a nine-vowel system with advanced-tongue-root

vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is an assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, me ...

. The vowels fall into two sets: * * , with the vowels of affixes depending on the set of vowels in the stem, and with /a/ functioning in both sets. There is some variation among dialects as to the presence of a tenth vowel, /ə/, which in some dialects functions as the +ATR counterpart of /a/. Diphthongs are and .

Consonants

Consonants are simple: * . Osman also includes /ʒ ħ/ in this list. /ʃ/ occurs primarily in the Sudanese dialect as a variant of /s/ appearing before /i/. The phonemic status of the

rhotics In phonetics, rhotic consonants, or "R-like" sounds, are liquid consonants that are traditionally represented orthographically by symbols derived from the Greek letter rho, including , in the Latin script and , in the Cyrillic script. Th ...

are unclear: Osman states that may be exchanged without any change in meaning, yet maintains that they are distinct phonemes. Of the

obstruent An obstruent () is a speech sound such as , , or that is formed by ''obstructing'' airflow. Obstruents contrast with sonorants, which have no such obstruction and so resonate. All obstruents are consonants, but sonorants include vowels as well as ...

s, /p/ may not occur word-initially, and only may occur word-finally, with /b/ in final position in some dialects. may not occur word-initially, and only appear in the middle of words, as in 'bird'.

Tone

There are five tones, ''high, mid, low, rising, falling,'' all of which may occur on simple vowels, for example in ''I watered'', ''I said'', ''right (direction)''. Tone distinguishes words, but also has grammatical functions; for example, the plural of many nouns is formed by changing the tone of the final syllable from low to high, and the perfective aspect of many verbs is similarly formed by changing the tone of the final syllable from low to high.

Syllable structure

Words tend to be short, often CV and CVCV. The most complex syllables are CVC and CRV, where ''R'' is either of the two

Orthography

In the 1950s, a Zaghawa schoolteacher named Adam Tajir created an alphabet for the Zaghawa language that was based on the clan identification marks (brands). Sometimes known as the camel alphabet, he based the phoneme choice on the

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...

language rather than on Zaghawa. Also, some of the marks were longer than others, which made it harder to use it as a computer font. In 2000, a Beri veterinarian named Siddick Adam Issa prepared an improved version of the alphabet which is named Beria Giray Erfe (Beria Writing Marks). In 2007, this system of writing was turned into a computer font by Seonil Yun in cooperation with

SIL International SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics) is an evangelical Christian non-profit organization whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to e ...

and the Mission Protestante Franco-Suisse au Tchad.http://scripts.sil.org/ZaghawaBeria_Home Zaghawa Beria Font There is also an

Arabic script The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it or a script directly derived from it, and th ...

alphabet under development, based on the Tijani system of writing African languages in the 13th century.

Notes

References

*Jakobi, Angelika and Joachim Crass 2004. ''Grammaire du beria (langue saharienne).'' Cologne: Rudiger Koppe. *Khidir, Z.F. 1999. ''Lexique des plantes connues Beri du Tchad''. University of Leipzig Papers on Africa, 11. University of Leipzig. *Khidir, Z.F. 2001. ''Lexique des animaux chez les Beri du Tchad''. University of Leipzig Papers on Africa, 17. University of Leipzig. *MacMichael, H.A. 1912. Notes on the Zaghawa and the People of Gebel Midob, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. ''The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland'', 42: 288–344. *Osman, Suleiman Norein. 2006. Phonology of the Zaghawa Language in Sudan. In Abu-Manga, Al-Amin and Gilley, Leoma and Storch, Anne (eds.), Insights into Nilo-Saharan Language, History and Culture: Proceedings of the 9th Nilo-Saharan Linguistic Colloquium, University of Khartoum, 347–361. Köln: Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe. *Tubiana, Joseph 1963. Note sur la langue des zaghawa. ''Travaux de XXVe congrès internationale des orientalistes'', 614–619. Moscow. *Tubiana, Marie-Josée 1964. ''Survivances préislamiques en pays zaghawa''. Paris: Université de Paris. *Tubiana, Marie-Josée 1985. ''Des troupeaux et de femmes: Mariage et transferts de biens chez les Beri (Zaghawa et Bideyat) du Tchad et du Soudan''. Paris: L’Harmattan. *Tubiana, Marie-Josée et Joseph Tubiana (eds.). 1995. ''Contes Zaghawa du Tchad''. Paris: L’Harmattan.

External links

Suleiman Osman: ''Phonology of Zaghawa Language in Sudan''
(presented at the 9th Nilo-Saharan colloquium at Khartoum)
Zaghawa Beria Computer FontELAR documentation on the Sudanese dialectal variant of Zaghawa
{{Authority control Saharan languages Languages of Chad Languages of Sudan Zaghawa people