Native to Senegal, Mauritania ISO 639-2 zen | Region Mederdra ISO 639-3 zen | |
Native speakers 200–300 in Mauritania (1998)
1,900 immigrants in Senegal (no date) Language family Afro-Asiatic
Berber
Western
Zenaga | ||
Zenaga (autonym Tuḍḍungiyya) is a Berber language spoken between Mederdra and the Atlantic coast in southwestern Mauritania and in Senegal.
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It shares its basic linguistic structure with other Berber idioms, but specific features are quite different. In fact, Zenaga 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 larger ancient Berber tribe, the Iznagen, who are known in Arabic as the Sanhaja.
Adrian Room's African Placenames gives Zenaga derivations for some place-names in Mauritania.
Demographics
Zenaga was once spoken throughout much of Mauritania, but fell into decline when its speakers were defeated by the Maqil Arabs in the Char Bouba war of the seventeenth 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):
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 Hassaniya Arabic, the main Arabic variety spoken in 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 Zenagui (a member of a servant tribe.)"
Half a century later, the number of speakers is reportedly around 2000. While Zenaga appears to be nearing extinction, Hassaniya Arabic contains a substantial number of Zenaga loanwords (more than 10% of the vocabulary.)
Dialects
There are significant dialect differences within Zenaga, notably between the Id-ab-lahsen and Tendgha dialects.
Religion
The primary religion observed by the Zenaga speakers is Sunni Islam, the largest branch of Islam, which observes the teachings of the Qur'an. The majority of Zenaga speakers recognize the first four caliphs as the rightly successors of Muhammad.