Tihishit language

Tihishit
Tagdal
Spoken in	Niger
Ethnicity	Igalan, Iberogan
Native speakers	27,000  (2000)
Language family	mixed Songhay–Tuareg
Dialects	Tagdal Tabarog
Language codes
ISO 639-3	tda

person	Agdal
people	Igalan
language	Tagdal

person
people	Iberogan
language	Tabarog

Tihishit is a mixed Northern Songhay language of central Niger. Ethnologue considers Tagdal a "mixed Berber–Songhay language",^[1][2] while other researchers consider it Northern Songhay.^[3] About half of its daily vocabulary is Tuareg, and three quarters overall. There are two dialects: Tagdal spoken by the Igdalen people, pastoralists who inhabit a region to the east along the Niger border to Tahoua in Niger,^[2] and Tabarog spoken by the Iberogan people of the Azawagh valley on the Niger–Mali border.

The name Tihishit is an ad-hoc cover term. Rueck & Christiansen^[4] 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.^[3]

References

1. ^ Ethnologue Tagdal: tda
2. ^ ^{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)
3. ^ ^{a b} Michael J Rueck; Niels Christiansen. Northern Songhay languages in Mali and Niger, a sociolinguistic survey. Summer Institute of Linguistics (1999).
4. ^ 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