Chadian Arabic

Chadian Arabic (also known as Shuwa/Shua/Suwa Arabic; Arabic: لهجة تشادية‎‎, Baggara Arabic, and, most recently, within a small scholarly milieu, Western Sudanic Arabic) is one of the regional colloquial varieties of Arabic. (The term "Shuwa Arabic", found in 20th-century Western linguistic scholarship, properly refers only to the Nigerian dialects of this particular language, and even then, "Shuwa" is not used by those speakers themselves.) It is the first language for over one million people, including town dwellers and nomadic cattle herders. The majority of its speakers live in southern Chad. Its range is an east-to-west oval in the Sahel, about 1400 miles long (12 to 20 degrees east longitude) by 300 miles north-to-south (between 10 and 14 degrees north latitude). Nearly all of this territory is in the two countries of Chad and Sudan. It is also spoken elsewhere in the vicinity of Lake Chad in the countries of Cameroon, Nigeria, Niger. Finally, it is spoken in slivers of the Central African Republic and South Sudan. In addition, this language serves as a lingua franca in much of the region. In most of its range, it is one of several local languages and often not among the major ones.

This language does not have a native name shared by all its speakers, beyond "Arabic". It arose as the native language of nomadic cattle herders (baggāra, Standard Arabic baqqāra, means 'cattlemen', from baqar). Since the publication of a grammar of a Nigerian dialect in 1920, this language has become widely cited academically as "Shuwa Arabic"; however, the term "Shuwa" was in use only among non-Arab people in Borno State. Around 2000, the term "Western Sudanic Arabic" was proposed by a specialist in the language, Jonathan Owens. The geographical sense of "Sudanic" invoked by Owens is not the modern country of Sudan, but the Sahel in general, a region dubbed bilad al-sudan, 'the land of the blacks', by Arabs as far back as the medieval era. In the era of British colonialism in Africa, colonial administrators too used "the Sudan" to mean the entire Sahel.