Chadian Arabic

Chadian Arabic
Shuwa
لهجة تشادية
Native to	Chad, Cameroon, Niger, Nigeria
Speakers	L1: 2.3 million (2005–2023) L2: 70,000 (2013)
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic West Semitic Central Semitic Arabic Chadian Arabic
Writing system	Arabic alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3	shu
Glottolog	chad1249

Chadian Arabic (Arabic: لهجة تشادية), also known as Shuwa Arabic, Western Sudanic Arabic, or West Sudanic Arabic (WSA), is a variety of Arabic and the first language of 1.6 million people, both town dwellers and nomadic cattle herders. Most of its speakers live in central and southern Chad. Its range is an east-to-west oval in the Sahel. Nearly all of this territory is within Chad and Sudan. It is also spoken elsewhere in the vicinity of Lake Chad in the countries of Cameroon, Nigeria and Niger. Finally, it is spoken in slivers of the Central African Republic. 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.

Naming and classification

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 بَقَّارَة, means 'cattlemen', from baqar).

In 1913, a French colonial administrator in Chad, Henri Carbou, wrote a grammar of the local dialect of the Ouaddaï highlands, a region of eastern Chad on the border with Sudan. In 1920, a British colonial administrator in Nigeria, Gordon James Lethem, wrote a grammar of the Borno dialect, in which he noted that the same language was spoken in Kanem (in western Chad) and Ouaddaï (in eastern Chad). Since its publication, 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, Nigeria. 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.

Based on population movements and shared genealogical histories, Sudanic and Egyptian varieties of Arabic have traditionally been classified into a larger Egypto-Sudanic grouping. However, alternative analysis of linguistic features supports the general independence of Sudanic Arabic varieties from Egyptian Arabic.

Distribution and varieties

Baggara belt.

Dialects

Two clear subdialects of Western Sudanic Arabic are discernable:

• Bagirmi Arabic – spoken from eastern Nigeria to Chad in the southern fringe of the area. Characterized by syllable final stress in forms such as katáb 'he wrote'.
• Urban varieties of Chad – spoken in Ndjamena and Abbeche, and characterized by simplification tendencies.

Speakers by country

Chad

The majority of speakers live in southern Chad between 10 and 14 degrees north latitude. In Chad, it is the local language of the national capital, N'Djamena, and its range encompasses such other major cities as Abéché, Am Timan, and Mao. It is the native language of 12% of Chadians. Chadian Arabic's associated lingua franca is widely spoken in Chad, so that Chadian Arabic and its lingua franca combined are spoken by somewhere between 40% and 60% of the Chadian population.

Sudan

In Sudan, it is spoken in the southwest, in southern Kordofan and southern Darfur, but excluding the cities of al-Ubayyid and al-Fashir.

Nigeria

Main article: Bagirmi Arabic

In Nigeria, it spoken by 10% of the population of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, and by at least 500,000 residents elsewhere in Borno State. Locally known as Bagirmi Arabic.

Other

See also: Diffa Arabs

Its range in other African countries includes a sliver of the Central African Republic, the northern half of its Vakaga Prefecture, which is adjacent to Chad and Sudan; a sliver of South Sudan at its border with Sudan; and the environs of Lake Chad spanning three other countries, namely part of Nigeria's (Borno State), Cameroon's Far North Region, and in the Diffa Department of Niger's Diffa Region. The number of speakers in Niger is estimated to be 150,000 people.

History

How this Arabic language arose is unknown. In 1994, Braukämper proposed that it arose in Chad starting in 1635 by the fusion of a population of Arabic speakers with a population of Fulani nomads. (The Fulani are a people, or group of peoples, who originate at or near the Atlantic coast but have expanded into most of the Sahel over centuries.)

During the colonial era, a form of pidgin Arabic known as Turku was used as a lingua franca. There are still Arabic pidgins in Chad today, such as Bongor Arabic, however most of them have not been described, so it is not known if they descend from Turku.

Phonology

Consonants

		Labial		Dental/Alveolar		Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
		plain	emph.	plain	emph.
Nasal		m	mˤ	n		ɲ	ŋ
Plosive/ Affricate	voiceless	p		t		tʃ	k	q	ʔ
	voiced	b		d	dˤ	dʒ	ɡ
	implosive				ɗˤ
Fricative	voiceless	f		s	sˤ	ʃ	x		h
	voiced			z
Tap/Trill				r	rˤ
Approximant				l	lˤ	j	w

Vowels

	Front	Back
Close	i iː	u uː
Mid	e eː	o oː
Open	a aː

Notes:

• Old Arabic */ɣ/ > /q/, /x/
• Old Arabic */ħ/ > /h/
• Old Arabic */ʕ/ > /ʔ/
• Old Arabic */ṭ/ > /ɗ/ ([ɗˤ])

It is characterized by the loss of the pharyngeals [ħ] and [ʕ], the interdental fricatives [ð], [θ] and [ðˤ], and diphthongs. But it also has /lˤ/, /rˤ/ and /mˤ/ as extra phonemic emphatics. Some examples of minimal pairs for such emphatics are /ɡallab/ "he galloped", /ɡalˤlˤab/ "he got angry"; /karra/ "he tore", /karˤrˤa/ "he dragged"; /amm/ "uncle", /amˤmˤ/ "mother". In addition, Nigerian Arabic has the feature of inserting an /a/ after gutturals (ʔ,h,x,q).

Grammar

A notable feature is the change of Standard Arabic Form V from tafaʕʕal(a) to alfaʕʕal; for example, the word taʔallam(a) becomes alʔallam. The first person singular perfect tense of verbs is different from its formation in other Arabic dialects in that it does not have a final t. Thus, the first person singular of the verb katab is katáb, with stress on the second syllable of the word, whereas the third-person singular is kátab, with stress on the first syllable.

Vocabulary

The following is a sample vocabulary:

Words of Arabic origin
Chadian Arabic	Meaning	Origin
أدان‎ ʔadān	ear	from آذان‎ ʔāḏān, the plural form of أذن‎ ʔuḏn
المي‎ ʔalmi	water	from ماء‎ māʔ with a frozen definite article
إيد‎ ʔīd	hand	from يد‎ yad
عيد‎ ʔīd	festival, celebration	from عيد‎ ʕīd with regular change of ʕ to ʔ
جدادة‎ jidāde	chicken (singulative)	from دجاجة‎ dajāja with metathesis
شدراي‎ šadarāy	tree (singulative)	from شجرة‎ šajara with dissimilation
Words of foreign origin
بعشوم‎ baʔashōm	jackal	from Beja ba'aashoob
بيك‎ bīk	ballpoint pen	from French bic
وتير‎ watīr	car	from French voiture

See also

• Languages of Chad
• Languages of Cameroon
• Varieties of Arabic

References

• Carbou, Henri (1954) [1913]. Méthode pratique pour l'étude de l'arabe parlé au Ouaday et à l'est du Tchad [Practical method for studying the Arabic spoken in Waddai and the east of Chad]. Paris: Librairie orientaliste Geuthner. The 1954 printing contains the 1913 edition, including the original title page.
• Fox, Andrew (October 1988). "Nigerian Arabic–English Dictionary by Alan S. Kaye, Book Review". Language. 64 (4). Language, Vol. 64, No. 4: 836. doi:10.2307/414603. JSTOR 414603.
• Kaye, Alan S. (1976). Chadian And Sudanese Arabic In The Light Of Comparative Arabic Dialectology. Mouton.
• Kaye, Alan S. (1987). Nigerian Arabic-English dictionary. Bibliotheca Afroasiatica. Vol. 2. Malibu: Undena.
• Owens, Jonathan (2007). "Close Encounters of a Different Kind: Two types of insertion in Nigerian Arabic code switching". In Miller, Catherine G. (ed.). Arabic in the city: issues in dialect contact and language variation. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-77311-9.
• Owens, Jonathan (2003). "Arabic dialect history and historical linguistic mythology". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 123 (4): 715–740. doi:10.2307/3589965. JSTOR 3589965.
• Owens, Jonathan (2006). A Linguistic History of Arabic. Oxford University Press.
• Pommerol, Patrice Jullien de. (1997). L'arabe tchadien: émergence d'une langue véhiculaire. Karthala. ISBN 9782865378043. 174 pp.
• Pommerol, Patrice Jullien de. (1999). Grammaire pratique de l'arabe tchadien. Karthala. ISBN 9782865379385. 280 pp. N'Djamena dialect.
• Watson, J. C. E. (1996). "Review of Owens 1994". Bulletin of Oriental and African Studies. 59: 359–360. doi:10.1017/S0041977X00031797. S2CID 162441223.

Further reading

• Howard, Charles G. 1921. [1] Shuwa Arabic Stories with an Introduction and Vocabulary Oxford: University Press, 1921, 114 pp.
• Kaye, Alan S. 1982. Dictionary of Nigerian Arabic. Malibu: Undena. Series: Bibliotheca Afroasiatica; 1. This volume is English-Arabic. 90 pp.
• Owens, Jonathan. 1993. A grammar of Nigerian Arabic. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
• Owens, Jonathan, ed. 1994. Arabs and Arabic in the Lake Chad Region. Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. Series: SUGIA (Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika); 14.
• Pommerol, Patrice Jullien de. 1999. J'apprends l'arabe tchadien. Karthala. 328 pp. N'Djamena dialect.
• Rumford, James, Rumford, Carol. 2020. Chadian Arabic, L'Arabe Tchadien. Manoa Press. 122 pp.
• Woidich, Manfred. 1988. [Review of Kaye 1987] . Journal of the American Oriental Society, October - December 1988, 108(4): 663-665

External links

• Chadian Arabic videos Archived 2018-01-18 at the Wayback Machine