Language Contact in the Sahara: An overview

I am very happy to announce the publication of my freely accessible overview of Language Contact in the Sahara, written for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Apart from being the first introduction to this topic to cover both sides of the Sahara, it encapsulates a good deal of my research program over the past few years, and gives some idea of what remains to be done in this domain. Here's the abstract; if it sounds interesting, go read it!

As might be expected from the difficulty of traversing it, the Sahara Desert has been a fairly effective barrier to direct contact between its two edges; trans-Saharan language contact is limited to the borrowing of non-core vocabulary, minimal from south to north and mostly mediated by education from north to south. Its own inhabitants, however, are necessarily accustomed to travelling desert spaces, and contact between languages within the Sahara has often accordingly had a much greater impact. Several peripheral Arabic varieties of the Sahara retain morphology as well as vocabulary from the languages spoken by their speakers’ ancestors, in particular Berber in the southwest and Beja in the southeast; the same is true of at least one Saharan Hausa variety. The Berber languages of the northern Sahara have in turn been deeply affected by centuries of bilingualism in Arabic, borrowing core vocabulary and some aspects of morphology and syntax. The Northern Songhay languages of the central Sahara have been even more profoundly affected by a history of multilingualism and language shift involving Tuareg, Songhay, Arabic, and other Berber languages, much of which remains to be unraveled. These languages have borrowed so extensively that they retain barely a few hundred core words of Songhay vocabulary; those loans have not only introduced new morphology but in some cases replaced old morphology entirely. In the southeast, the spread of Arabic westward from the Nile Valley has created a spectrum of varieties with varying degrees of local influence; the Saharan ones remain almost entirely undescribed. Much work remains to be done throughout the region, not only on identifying and analyzing contact effects but even simply on describing the languages its inhabitants speak.

Beja and beyond

Some interesting news this week from the Beja, an ethnic group of the Red Sea coast of Sudan and Egypt. It's unclear whether this rebellion is representative of the Beja's general feelings or just a figleaf for Eritrean intervention (or both), but it's a story to watch - and an excuse to bring up a cool language.

Beja is Afro-Asiatic* - either part of Cushitic or a separate branch, depending on who you ask - and happens to be among the most obviously similar languages to Semitic and to Berber. The noun morphology is already fairly suggestive:

	Beja definite article	Arabic noun endings	Kabyle obligatory prefix
Masculine nominative singular	u:-	-u	w-
Masculine accusative singular	o-	-a	a-
Feminine nominative singular	tu:-	-atu	t-
Feminine accusative singular	to-	-ata	ta-

And the pronominal object suffixes add credence:

	Beja	Arabic	Kabyle
me	-i, -o	-ni:	-iyi
you	-ok	-ka	-ik
us	-on	-na:	-aγ
you (pl.)	-okn	-kum	-kən

(Beja, apparently, has no third person suffixes.) However, what really clinches it is the verbal system. Beja has two principal classes of verbs: one that often takes prefixes, and one that usually just takes suffixes. In Semitic, the prefixes are used for the imperfect, and the suffixes developed from a stative (still to be seen in Akkadian) into a perfect; Berber mostly retains the prefixes, whereas only minor traces of the suffixes remain. The prefixes are especially telling:

	Beja	Arabic	Kabyle
I	a-	'a-	-γ
you (m.)	ti- -a	ta-	t- -ḍ
you (f.)	ti- -i	ta- -i:	t- -ḍ
he	i-	ya-	i-
she	ti-	ta-	t-
we	n-	na-	n-
you (pl.)	ti- -na	ta- -u:na	t- -m
they	i- -na	ya- -u:na	-n

while the suffixes are best exemplified in Beja in the conditional mood:

	Beja	Arabic	Dahalo general non-past (Cushitic)
I	-i	-tu	-o
you (m.)	-tia	-ta	-to
you (f.)	-tii	-ti	-to
he	-i	-a	-:i
she	-ti	-at	-to
we	-ni	-na:	-no
you (pl.)	-tina	-tum	-ten
they	-ina	-u:	-en, -ammi

Just for good measure, in the prefix verbs you also have a feature found in Akkadian (among other Semitic languages) and Berber but lost in Arabic: a present tense formed by doubling the middle radical (in Berber and Akkadian) or adding n before the middle radical (in Beja). Compare:

• Beja aktim ("I arrived") > akanti:m ("I arrive")
  
• Akkadian almad ("I learned") > alammad ("I am learning")*
  
• Tamasheq əlmədǎγ ("I learn", irrealis) > lammǎdǎγ ("I am learning", realis)
  

It's really remarkable, considering all this, that Afro-Asiatic research isn't more advanced. There are two etymological dictionaries out there, admittedly - Ehret's and Orel and Stolbova's - but, though valuable, they frequently disagree with each other, and neither has attained general acceptance.

* Some people think Afro-Asiatic is not proved. I can't think why. Omotic's membership is not entirely clear, but all the rest is just plain obvious.

* Previously misquoted forms corrected, thanks to Matthew Loran.