Zenaga

Abstract This chapter describes Zenaga as the chief representative of Western Berber (Afro-Asiatic), spoken by a few thousand bilingual (Zenaga/Hassaniyya) people of over 45 years of age. Their homeland forms a linguistic island in southwest Mauritania. Zenaga is highly endangered. In spite of intensive and long-lasting contact with both dialectal and literary Arabic it has retained major characteristics of Berber languages such as emphatic phonemes and a rich and complex morphology. But it also exhibits numerous peculiar features whose emergence is likely to be explained by Zenaga’s very remote geographical position. Certain conservative features (e.g. a laryngeal stop, vocalic alternation in verbal morphology) occur side by side with others that are, or could be, innovations (e.g. diminutive derivation, future marker).