Sened is an

extinct Extinction is the termination of an organism by the death of its Endling, last member. A taxon may become Functional extinction, functionally extinct before the death of its last member if it loses the capacity to Reproduction, reproduce and ...

East Zenati Berber language that was spoken in the nearby towns of Sened and Majoura (Berber ''Tmagurt'') in southern

Tunisia Tunisia, officially the Republic of Tunisia, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It is bordered by Algeria to the west and southwest, Libya to the southeast, and the Mediterranean Sea to the north and east. Tunisia also shares m ...

until the mid-20th century. In 1911, the whole town of Sened spoke Berber; by 1968, only the elderly did.

Sample

From a section translated from the epic Taghribat Bani Hilal, detailing the incursion of the Banu Hilal, in Provotelle's ''Etude sur la Tamazir't ou Zenatia de Qalaât Es-sned (Tunisie)'' (1911). The Arabic and French transcriptions of the text are reproduced unchanged; in the latter, r' represents a

voiced uvular fricative The voiced uvular fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some Speech communication, spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , an inverted small uppercase letter , or in broad t ...

, kh a voiceless uvular fricative, ch represents English sh, ou represents /u/ or /w/, i represents /i/ or /j/, and e represents schwa.

References

External links

Tamazight in Tunisia: by Ahmed Boukous
(

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

) Berber languages Berbers in Tunisia Extinct languages of Africa Languages of Tunisia Languages extinct in the 20th century {{Berber-lang-stub