Tagdal language

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

• /w/ may be heard as [ʋ] in the Tarbun dialect.

• 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].

Tagdal is an agglutinative language, most likely due to Tuareg influence.

Tagdal gets its pronominal system from Northern Songhay languages.

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