Sokna Language

Sokna or Sawknah is a Berber language spoken in the town of Sokna (Isuknan) and the village of Fuqaha in northeastern Fezzan in Libya. The most extensive and recent materials on it are Sarnelli (1924) for Sokna and Paradisi (1963) for El-Fogaha. Both articles report that the language was spoken only by a handful of old people at the time, so it is generally presumed to be extinct. The Ethnologue reports that it had 5,600 speakers as of 2006; the basis for this claim is unclear.

Aikhenvald & Militarev (1984) and Blench (2006) consider Sokna and Fezzan to be separate languages. Blench lists Tmessa and Al-Foqaha as dialects of Fezzan.

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