Tagdal language
| Gadal | |
|---|---|
| Tagdal-Tabarog | |
| Tihishit | |
| Native to | Niger |
| Ethnicity | Igalan, Iberogan |
Native speakers | 27,000 (2000)[1] |
| Dialects |
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | tda |
| Glottolog | tagd1238 |
| ELP | Tagdal |
 | |
| Gadal | |
|---|---|
| Person | Agdal |
| People | Igdalan |
| Language | Tagdal |
| Barog | |
|---|---|
| People | Iberogan |
| Language | Tabarog |
The Gadal language, Tagdal, is a mixed Northern Songhay language of central Niger. Ethnologue considers it a "mixed Berber–Songhay language",[1][3] while other researchers consider it Northern Songhay.[4] 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,[3] 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[5] 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.[4]
Meanwhile, the Iberogan sometimes refer to their language as Tagdal.
References
- ^ a b Gadal at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
- ^ This map is based on classification from Glottolog and data from Ethnologue.
- ^ a b 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)
- ^ a b Michael J Rueck; Niels Christiansen. Northern Songhay languages in Mali and Niger, a sociolinguistic survey. Summer Institute of Linguistics (1999).
- ^ 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