Zenati languages
| Zenati | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution |
North Africa |
| Linguistic classification |
Afro-Asiatic
|
| Subdivisions | |
| Glottolog | zena1250 |
The Zenati languages are a branch of the Northern Berber language family of North Africa, which were named after the medieval Zenata Berber tribe. They were first proposed in the works of French linguist Edmond Destaing (1915) (1920–23). Zenata dialects are distributed across the central Maghreb, from northeastern Morocco to just west of Algiers, and the northern Sahara, from southwestern Algeria around Bechar to Zuwara in Libya. In much of this range, they are limited to discontinuous pockets in a predominantly Arabic-speaking landscape. The most widely spoken Zenati languages are Riffian in northeastern Morocco and Shawiya in eastern Algeria, each of which have over a million speakers.
According to Kossmann (2013: 21–24), Zenati is a rather arbitrary grouping, in which he includes the following varieties:
Blench & Dendo (ms, 2006) considers Zenati to consist of just three distinct languages, with the rest (in parentheses) dialects:
Shenwa and Zuwara are not addressed.
According to Kossmann (1999:31-32, 86, 172), common innovations defining the Zenati languages include:
In addition to the correspondence of k and g to š and ž, Chaker (1972), while expressing uncertainty about the linguistic coherence of Zenati, notes as shared Zenati traits:
These characteristics identify a more restricted subset of Berber than those previously mentioned, mainly northern Saharan varieties; they exclude, for example, Chaoui and all but the easternmost Riff dialects.
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