Tagdal (Tuareg name: Tagdalt) is a mixed Northern Songhay language of central Niger. Ethnologue considers it a "mixed Berber–Songhay language", while other researchers consider it Northern Songhay. Nicolaï (1981) argued that Tagdal was originally derived from the Tuareg languages and adopted characteristics of Songhai rather than vice versa.
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, and Tabarog, spoken by the Iberogan people of the Azawagh valley on the Niger–Mali border. The Iberogan sometimes refer to their language as Tagdal.
Nicolaï (1981) uses the name Tihishit as a cover term. Rueck & Christiansen 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.
Phonology
Consonants
| Labial | Alveolar | Post-alv./Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Pharyn-geal | Glottal | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | phar. | ||||||||
| Nasal | m | n | nˤ | ŋ | |||||
| Plosive/Affricate | voiceless | t | tˤ | tʃ | k | q | |||
| voiced | b | d | dˤ | dʒ | ɡ | ||||
| Fricative | voiceless | f | s | sˤ | ʃ | x | ħ | h | |
| voiced | z | zˤ | ʒ | ɣ | ʕ | ||||
| Tap | ɾ | ɾˤ | |||||||
| Lateral | l | lˤ | |||||||
| Approximant | w | j | |||||||
- /w/ may be heard as [ʋ] in the Tarbun dialect.
Vowels
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i iː | u uː | |
| Mid | e eː | ə | o oː |
| Open | a aː |
- Each of the vowels /i, e, ə, a, o, u/ tend to fluctuate within the presence of the phonemes /x, ɣ, q, ʕ, ħ/ or of a pharyngealized consonant, as [ɨ, ɛ, ʌ, ɑ, ɔ, o].8
Grammar
Tagdal is an agglutinative language, most likely due to Tuareg influence.9: 71
Pronouns
Tagdal gets its pronominal system from Northern Songhay languages.
| Singular | Plural | |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | ɣɑy | iri |
| 2nd | nin | ɑnji |
| 3rd | ɑnga | ingi |
| Singular | Plural | |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | ɣɑ- | iri- |
| 2nd | ɘn/ni- | ɑnji- |
| 3rd | ɑ- | i- |
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:10
- ɣɑnɘkoy: I did not go
- ɣɑsɘbkoy: I was not going/I do not (habitually) go
- ɣɑnəyɑrdɑ: I disagree
References
Ritter, Georg (2009). Wörterbuch zur Sprache und Kultur der Twareg II Deutsch-Twareg. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. p. 735. ↩
Tagdal at Ethnologue (26th ed., 2023) https://www.ethnologue.com/language/tda ↩
Benítez-Torres, Carlos M. (2009). "Inflectional vs. Derivational Morphology in Tagdal: A Mixed Language" (PDF). In Masangu Matondo; Fiona Mc Laughlin; Eric Potsdam (eds.). In Selected Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference on African Linguistics. Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. pp. 69–83. http://www.lingref.com/cpp/acal/38/paper2136.pdf ↩
Michael J Rueck; Niels Christiansen. Northern Songhay languages in Mali and Niger, a sociolinguistic survey. Summer Institute of Linguistics (1999). http://www.sil.org/silesr/1999/008/nsonghay.html ↩
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 http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00456346/ ↩
Benítez-Torres, Carlos M. (2009). "Inflectional vs. Derivational Morphology in Tagdal: A Mixed Language" (PDF). In Masangu Matondo; Fiona Mc Laughlin; Eric Potsdam (eds.). In Selected Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference on African Linguistics. Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. pp. 69–83. http://www.lingref.com/cpp/acal/38/paper2136.pdf ↩
Michael J Rueck; Niels Christiansen. Northern Songhay languages in Mali and Niger, a sociolinguistic survey. Summer Institute of Linguistics (1999). http://www.sil.org/silesr/1999/008/nsonghay.html ↩
Benítez-Torres, Carlos M. (2021). A Grammar of Tagdal: a Northern Songhay language. Leiden University. hdl:1887/3240577. /wiki/Hdl_(identifier) ↩
Benítez-Torres, Carlos M. (2009). "Inflectional vs. Derivational Morphology in Tagdal: A Mixed Language" (PDF). In Masangu Matondo; Fiona Mc Laughlin; Eric Potsdam (eds.). In Selected Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference on African Linguistics. Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. pp. 69–83. http://www.lingref.com/cpp/acal/38/paper2136.pdf ↩
Benítez-Torres, Carlos M. (2009). Inflectional vs. Derivational Morphology in Tagdal: A Mixed Language. Cascadilla Proceedings Project. pp. 69–83. ISBN 9781574734294. 9781574734294 ↩