Chadian Arabic - Name and Origin

Name and Origin

This language does not have a native name shared by all its speakers, beyond "Arabic". It arose as the native language of nomadic cattle herders (baggāra, Standard Arabic baqqāra, means 'cattlemen', from baqar). Since the publication of a grammar of a Nigerian dialect in 1920, this language has become widely cited academically as "Shuwa Arabic"; however, the term "Shuwa" was in use only among non-Arabic speaking people in Borno State. Around 2000, the term "Western Sudanic Arabic" was proposed by a specialist in the language, Jonathan Owens. The geographical sense of "Sudanic" invoked by Owens is not the modern country of Sudan, but the Sahel in general, a region dubbed bilad al-sudan, 'the land of the blacks', by Arabs as far back as the medieval era. In the era of British colonialism in Africa, colonial administrators too used "the Sudan" to mean the entire Sahel.

How this Arabic language arose is unknown. In 1994, Braukämper proposed that it arose in Chad starting in 1635 by the fusion of a population of Arabic speakers with a population of Fulani nomads. (The Fulani are a people, or group of peoples, who originate at or near the Atlantic coast but have expanded into most of the Sahel over centuries.)