Language Contact in Tagdal, a Northern Songhay Language of Niger

This chapter describes non-Songhay structures (mostly of Berber origin) in Tagdal, a Northern Songhay language of Niger that has preserved a few hundred morphemes of Songhay origin and which exhibits extensive contact-induced change including bilingual suppletion. Regional and literary forms of Arabic (and latterly French) have played their roles, but the major components which have been absorbed into Tagdal are from Berber languages, including (but not exclusively) Tuareg varieties. This has included not only massive lexical transfer (much more than 50% of the attested Tagdal lexicon) but a large number of morphosyntactic subsystems, fabric as well as transfer, and it has also resulted in the increase in use of phonemes of non-Songhay origin.