Ouargli, or Teggargrent (also ''Twargrit, Təggəngusit''), is a
Zenati
The Zenati languages are a branch of the Northern Berber language family of North Africa. They were named after the medieval Zenata Berber tribal confederation. They were first proposed in the works of French linguist Edmond Destaing (1915) (19 ...
Berber language
The Berber languages, also known as the Amazigh languages or Tamazight,, ber, label= Tuareg Tifinagh, ⵜⵎⵣⵗⵜ, ) are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They comprise a group of closely related languages spoken by Berber comm ...
. It is spoken in the oases of
Ouargla
Ouargla (Berber: Wargrən, ar, ورقلة) is the capital city of Ouargla Province in the Sahara Desert in southern Algeria. It has a flourishing petroleum industry and hosts one of Algeria's universities, the University of Ouargla. The commune o ...
(''Wargrən'') and
N'Goussa
N'Goussa ( ar, ﻧﻘﻮﺳﺔ) is a town and commune, coextensive with the district of the same name, in Ouargla Province, Algeria. Some of its inhabitants speak the Ouargli language. As of 2008, the population of the town was 19,039, up fr ...
(''Ingusa'') in
Algeria
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.
As of 1987, Ouargli had no more than 10,000 speakers.
Ethnologue estimated only 5,000 speakers as of 1995.
There are some differences between the dialects of Ouargla (''Təggargrənt'') and N'Goussa (''Təggəngusit''), notably in the position of pronominal
clitic
In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...
s; within Ouargla, there are minor differences between the three tribes At-Brahim, At-Sisin and At-Waggin.
Speakers from Ouargla regard the varieties of Ouargla, N'Goussa,
Tugurt/Temacine and
Tumzabt/Mozabite, and possibly other Zenati varieties, as dialects of a single language they call ''Twargrit''. According to Delheure (1987:355), ''at Wargrən fəhhəmən d awəḥdi tawsint'', "the Ouarglis understand Temacine very well."
The principal grammatical study is Biarnay (1908); a less detailed sketch is provided in Basset (1893). Its lexicon is fairly extensively documented in Delheure's (1987) dictionary. The bilingual texts in Biarnay and Basset are more recently supplemented by the texts on daily