Siwi language

Siwi (also known as Siwan or Siwa Berber; native name: Jlan n isiwan) is the easternmost Berber language, spoken in the western Egyptian desert by an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people in the oases of Siwa and Gara, near the Libyan border. Siwi is the normal language of daily communication among the Egyptian Berbers of Siwa and Gara, but because it is not taught at local schools, used in the media nor recognised by the Egyptian government, its long-term survival may be threatened by contacts with outsiders and by the use of Egyptian Arabic in mixed marriages; nearly all Siwis today learn to speak Egyptian Arabic as a second language from an early age. Siwi has been heavily influenced by Arabic, notably Egyptian and Bedouin, but also earlier stages of Arabic. Siwi is the only Berber language indigenous to Egypt and is natively spoken further east than any other Berber variety of North Africa. Within Berber, it stands out for a number of unusual linguistic features, including the collapse of gender distinctions in the plural, the absence of dedicated negative forms of the verb, the use of full finite agreement on the verb in subject relativisation, the use of la for sentential negation and the borrowing from Arabic of a productive comparative form for adjectives. Siwi also shows a typological feature that is strikingly rare, not only regionally but also worldwide: addressee agreement on demonstratives. Siwi was traditionally associated with the Zenati subgroup of Berber, following the 15th century historian al-Maqrizi, and Destaing (1920/3), who treated both as members of a "groupe du Nord", on the basis of similarities in the verbal system. Vycichl (2005) notes that it shares the feature of prefix vowel reduction with Zenati. Aikhenvald and Militarev (1984), followed by Ethnologue placed Siwi in an Eastern Berber group, along with Awjila and Sokna in eastern and central Libya. Kossmann (1999) links it with Sokna and the Nafusi dialect cluster of western Libya and Tunisia, but not with Awjila.

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Related concepts (8)

Siwi language

Egypt

Egypt (مصر ALA mɑsʕr), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and the Sinai Peninsula in the southwest corner of Asia. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Gaza Strip of Palestine and Israel to the northeast, the Red Sea to the east, Sudan to the south, and Libya to the west. The Gulf of Aqaba in the northeast separates Egypt from Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

Pharyngeal consonant

A pharyngeal consonant is a consonant that is articulated primarily in the pharynx. Some phoneticians distinguish upper pharyngeal consonants, or "high" pharyngeals, pronounced by retracting the root of the tongue in the mid to upper pharynx, from (ary)epiglottal consonants, or "low" pharyngeals, which are articulated with the aryepiglottic folds against the epiglottis at the entrance of the larynx, as well as from epiglotto-pharyngeal consonants, with both movements being combined.