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Tagdal (Tuareg name: ''Tagdalt'') is a mixed Northern Songhay language of central Niger.
Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' (stylized as ''Ethnoloɠue'') is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensiv ...
considers it a "mixed Berber–Songhay language", while other researchers consider it Northern Songhay. There are two dialects: Tagdal proper, spoken by the Igdalen people, pastoralists who inhabit a region to the east along the Niger border to Tahoua in Niger, and Tabarog, spoken by the Iberogan people of the Azawagh valley on the Niger–Mali border. Nicolaï (1981) uses the name ''Tihishit'' as a cover term. Rueck & ChristiansenCatherine Taine-Cheikh
Les langues parlées au sud Sahara et au nord Sahel
De l'Atlantique à l'Ennedi (Catalogue de l'exposition « Sahara-Sahel »), Centre Culturel Français d'Abidjan (Ed.) (1989) 155-173
say that
...the Igdalen and the Iberogan have for many purposes been treated as one group, and their speech forms are closely related. Nicolaï uses "tihishit" as a common designator for these two speech forms...; however, this term is ambiguous. "Tihishit" is a term of Tamajaq origin meaning "the language of the blacks". The Igdalen and Iberogan used it to refer to all Northern Songhay speech forms.Michael J Rueck; Niels Christiansen

Summer Institute of Linguistics (1999).
Meanwhile, the Iberogan sometimes refer to their language as Tagdal.


Grammar

Tagdal is an agglutinative language, most likely due to Tuareg influence.


Pronouns

Tagdal gets its pronominal system from Northern Songhay languages. Subject prefixes: Tadgal has two different prefixes used for negation. The first is ''nɘ''-, which functions as perfective negation, and is the default choice for negation. It indicates something that might have happened in the past, but didn't, or in the case of stative verbs, something that is not true. The other negation prefix is ''sɘ''-, which acts as a negation in the present or future. Uses of this negation are shown in these examples: ''ɣɑnɘkoy'': I did not go ''ɣɑsɘbkoy'': I was not going/I do not (habitually) go ''ɣɑnəyɑrdɑ'': I disagree


References

Tuareg languages Languages of Niger Songhay languages Mixed languages {{ns-lang-stub