Northern Songhay language
Northern Songhay is the smaller of the two branches of the Songhay languages. It is a group of heavily Berber-influenced dialects spoken in scattered oases of the Sahara.
Languages
The nomadic varieties include Tihishit in central Niger aro ...
of central
Niger
)
, official_languages =
, languages_type = National languagesEthnologue considers it a "mixed Berber–Songhay language", while other researchers consider it Northern Songhay. There are two dialects: Tagdal proper, spoken by the
Igdalen people The Igdalen (var.: Igdalan, Agdal) are a Berber people inhabiting northwestern Niger and parts of Mali and Algeria.pastoralists
Pastoralism is a form of animal husbandry where domesticated animals (known as "livestock") are released onto large vegetated outdoor lands (pastures) for grazing, historically by nomadic people who moved around with their herds. The animal s ...
who inhabit a region to the east along the
Niger
)
, official_languages =
, languages_type = National languagesTahoua
Tahoua is a city in Niger and the administrative centre of the Department of Tahoua and the larger Tahoua Region.Tah ...
Azawagh
The Azawagh (alias ''Azaouagh'' or ''Azawak'') is a dry structural basin, basin covering what is today the northwestern Niger, as well as parts of northeastern Mali and southern Algeria. The Azawagh is mainly made up of Sahelian and Saharan f ...
valley on the Niger–Mali border.
Nicolaï (1981) uses the name ''Tihishit'' as a cover term. Rueck & ChristiansenCatherine 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 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.Michael J Rueck; Niels Christiansen Summer Institute of Linguistics (1999).
Meanwhile, the Iberogan sometimes refer to their language as Tagdal.
Grammar
Tagdal is an
agglutinative language
An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) tend to r ...
, most likely due to Tuareg influence.
Pronouns
Tagdal gets its pronominal system from Northern Songhay languages.
Subject prefixes:
Tadgal has two different prefixes used for negation. The first is ''nɘ''-, which functions as perfective negation, and is the default choice for negation. It indicates something that might have happened in the past, but didn't, or in the case of stative verbs, something that is not true. The other negation prefix is ''sɘ''-, which acts as a negation in the present or future. Uses of this negation are shown in these examples:
''ɣɑnɘkoy'': I did not go
''ɣɑsɘbkoy'': I was not going/I do not (habitually) go
''ɣɑnəyɑrdɑ'': I disagree