Zenaga (autonym
Tuḍḍungiyya) is a Berber language spoken by some 200 to 300 people (Ethnologue estimate, 1998) between
MederdraMederdra is a small town and commune in south-west Mauritania. As of 2000 it had a population of 6858.- Transport :It lies on the route of a proposed railway line to connect phosphate mines at Kaedi with the capital and port of Nouakchott....
and the
AtlanticThe Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's oceanic divisions. With a total area of about 106.4 million square kilometres , it covers approximately one-fifth of the Earth's surface and about one-quarter of its water surface area. The first part of its name refers to the Atlas of Greek...
coast in southwestern
MauritaniaMauritania , officially the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, is a country in northwest Africa. It is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean on the west, by Senegal on the southwest, by Mali on the east and southeast, by Algeria on the northeast, and by the Morocco-controlled Western Sahara on the northwest...
. The language shares its basic structure with other
Berber languagesThe Berber languages are a group of very closely related languages and dialects spoken in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and the Egyptian area of Siwa, as well as by large Berber communities in parts of Niger and Mali. A relatively sparse but very old population extends into the whole Sahara and...
, but specific details are quite different; in fact, it is probably the most divergent surviving Berber language, with a significantly different sound system made even more distant by sound changes such as /l/ > /dj/ and /x/ > /k/, as well as a difficult to explain profusion of glottal stops. The name 'Zenaga' comes from that of a much bigger ancient Berber tribe, known to medieval Arab geographers as the Senhaja; the name "
SenegalSenegal , officially the Republic of Senegal, is a country south of the Sénégal River in western Africa. Senegal is bounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the west, Mauritania to the north, Mali to the east, and Guinea and Guinea-Bissau to the south, and it also encircles The Gambia on its three sides,...
" is thought to derive from "Zenaga" as well.
Zenaga was once spoken throughout much of Mauritania, but fell into decline when its speakers were defeated by the
MaqilThe Maqil or Maquil were a collection of Arab Bedouin tribes of Yemeni origin who migrated westwards via Egypt during the 13th century. The Beni Hassan tribes claim to be descendants of Maqil, once living in Tunisia. Maqil had two sons Suhair and Mohammed...
ArabArab people or Arabs are an ethnic group whose members identify along linguistic, cultural or genealogical grounds...
s in the
Char Bouba warThe Char Bouba war or the Mauritanian Thirty Years War, took place between 1644-74 in the tribal areas of what is today Mauritania and Western Sahara...
of the 17th century. After this war, they were forbidden to bear arms, and variously became either specialists in Islamic religious scholarship or servants to more powerful tribes. It was among the former, more prestigious group that Zenaga survived longest.
In 1940 (Dubié 1940), Zenaga was spoken by about 13,000 people belonging to four nomadic tribes distributed in an area roughly bounded by St. Louis, Podor, Boutilimit, and Nouakchott (but including none of these cities):
- Tashumsha ("the five"): 4653 speakers out of 12000 members
- D-abu-djhes (Arabic Id-ab-lahsen): 5000 out of 5000
- Gumdjedjen (Arabic Ikumleilen), subtribe of the Ida ou el Hadj: 700 (out of Ida ou el Hadj population of 4600)
- Tendgha: 2889 out of 8500
(Zenaga names from Nicolas (1953:102.)
These tribes, according to Dubié, traditionally specialised in Islamic religious scholarship, and led a nomadic lifestyle, specialising in sheep and cows. (Camel-herding branches of the same tribes had already switched to Arabic.) Even then, many speakers were shifting to
HassaniyaHassānīya Arabic is an Arabic variety originally spoken by the Beni Hassān Bedouin tribes, who extended their authority over most of Mauritania and the Western Sahara between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. It has almost completely replaced the Berber languages spoken in this region...
Arabic, the main language of Mauritania, and all were bilingual. Zenaga was used only within the tribe, and it was considered impolite to speak it when non-speakers were present; some speakers deliberately avoided using Zenaga with their children, hoping to give them a head start in Hassaniya. However, many speakers regarded Zenaga as a symbol of their independence and their religious fervor; Dubie cites a Hassaniya proverb: "A Moor who speaks Zenaga is certainly not a
ZenaguiThe Znaga or Zenaga tribes were at the bottom of Sahrawi-Moorish society in today's Mauritania and Western Sahara in North Africa. They performed demeaning duties for their Hassane and Zawiya overlords, and were additionally exploited through payment of the horma tax in exchange for protection,...
(a member of a servant tribe.)"
Half a century later, the number of speakers is reportedly under 300 (according to Ethnologue). However, while Zenaga appears to be nearing extinction,
HassaniyaHassānīya Arabic is an Arabic variety originally spoken by the Beni Hassān Bedouin tribes, who extended their authority over most of Mauritania and the Western Sahara between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. It has almost completely replaced the Berber languages spoken in this region...
, the dominant
Arabic languageArabic is a Central Semitic language, thus related to and classified alongside other Semitic languages such as Hebrew and the Neo-Aramaic languages. In terms of speakers, the Arabic macrolanguage is the largest member of the Semitic language family. It is spoken by more than 280 million people as...
of Mauritania, contains a substantial number of Zenaga
loanwordA loanword is a word borrowed from one language and incorporated into another.-General:By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept, whereby it is the meaning or idiom that is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself.The word loanword is itself a calque of the German...
s (more than
http://www.unice.fr/ILF-CNRS/ofcaf/15/queffelec.html 10% of the vocabulary.)
There are significant dialect differences within Zenaga, notably between the Id-ab-lahsen and Tendgha dialects.
The
ISO 639-2ISO 639-2:1998, Codes for the representation of names of languages Part 2: Alpha-3 code, is the second part of the ISO 639 standard, which lists codes for the representation of the names of languages. The three-letter codes given for each language in this part of the standard are referred to as...
code for Zenaga is:
zen.