Bagirmi Arabic

Bagirmi Arabic
Nigerian Arabic Chad–Nigerian Arabic
لهجة باجيرمي
Native to	Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria
Region	Far North Region (Cameroon), Baguirmi Department (Chad), Borno State (Nigeria)
Ethnicity	Shuwa Arabs
Native speakers	500,000
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic West Semitic Central Semitic Arabic Chadian Arabic Bagirmi Arabic
Writing system	Arabic alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	char1283

Bagirmi Arabic, also known as Nigerian Arabic or Chad–Nigerian Arabic, is a Chadian Arabic dialect spoken by about 500,000 speakers on the Chad-Nigeria border, in the Borno State of Nigeria and the Baguirmi Department of Chad.

This is heavily influenced primarily by Hausa and Kanuri, as well as Chadic languages due to their long-standing language contact.

History

Arabs first came to the Lake Chad region on the border with Cameroon and Nigeria in the late 14th century. They were part of a slow migration from Upper Egypt to northern Sudan that began in the early 13th century, which gained momentum after the fall of the Nubian Kingdom in northern Sudan in the 14th century. Overall, Nigerian Arabic shows a series of significant isoglosses linking it to Upper Egypt varieties, through Sudanese Arabic, although it exhibits interesting 'archaisms' yang menghubungkannya dengan wilayah-wilayah yang jauh dari Afrika. Its closest relative is found in what is called Western Sudanese Arabic, stretching between northeastern Nigeria in the west and Kordofan in the east. When its properties are compared with other varieties of Arabic, it is implicitly understood that this does not necessarily extend to other Western Sudanese varieties. Many of the extended functions of the Nigerian Arabic demonstratives listed below are also found in Kordofanian Arabic. Arabic in Chad and Nigeria border itself is divided into two dialects, namely the western dialect (spoken in Nigeria) and the eastern dialect (Spoken in Chad), which is also called Bagirmi Arabic. because this spoken by Arabs in the Bagirmi-speaking area.

Language contact is an integral part of historical linguistics. In the case of Arabic, the history of Arabic has different interpretations, so it is important here to briefly reiterate the different views. All contemporary Arabic varieties are derived from a reconstructed ancestor. Whether the form is singular or plural is a crucial question, but it can only be answered legitimately within the methodology of historical linguistics. As is generally accepted, historical linguistics operates at the intersection of inheritance and contact, and examine changes due to internal developments and changes due to contact. In the case of Arabic, this contact goes back to the Pre-Islamic Arab trade era. Furthermore, it operates at the level of speech communities, and Arabic has and has had many speech community, each of which has its own linguistic history. The history of speech communities does not coincide with political history, usually with the history of particular states, or even with cultural entities such as nomadic lifestyles.

In the 1990s, there were still large numbers of monolingual Arabic speakers in their traditional areas in northeastern Nigeria, especially in the area along the Cameroon border known to Nigerian Arabs as the Kala–Balge region. Although Standard Arabic has always been the variety known among the educated elite in Borno State from all ethnic backgrounds, Along with Hausa, this language has gained considerable momentum in recent years. Although traditionally Classical Arabic, as part of memorizing the Koran, has always been part of the Arab people's linguistic repertoire. It was not until around 1990 that the teaching of Standard Arabic as a school subject spread oral fluency in this variety.

Distribution

Its speakers are concentrated in the north-eastern part of Nigeria, stretching to the Cameroon–Nigeria border, as far south as Banki, as far west as Gubio, as far south as Maiduguri, as far to Damboa. In Maiduguri alone the number of speakers is around 50,000. The speakers are nomadic Shuwa of Baggara Arabs who live in an area called the Baggara Belt, where they spread to western Sudan, especially in Darfur and Kordofan.

Classification

In Glottolog 5.0 (2024), it is classified as a dialect of Chadian Arabic, along with one other dialect, Batha. In the classification, it is also referred to as Chari-Baguirmi, named after the Chari-Baguirmi Region in Chad.

See also

• Varieties of Arabic
• Baggara Arabs
• Chadian Arabic
• Sudanese Arabic

External links

• Ibraheem, Lateef O. (2012). "Arabic Language and Culture in Nigeria: The Journey so Far" (PDF). Research Repository: University of Ilorin. 58. Singapore: International Proceedings of Economics Development and Research: 88–92.