Songhay Languages

Songhay Languages

The Songhay or Songhai languages (pronounced, or are found in the cities of Timbuktu and Gao and are a group of closely related languages/dialects. They are centered around the middle stretches of the Niger River in the west African states of Mali, Niger, Benin, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria. They have been widely used as a lingua franca in that region ever since the era of the Songhay Empire. In Mali, the government has officially adopted the dialect of Gao (east of Timbuktu) as the dialect to be used as a medium of primary education.

As regards interintelligibility of Songhay languages, the dialect of Koyraboro Senni spoken in Gao is unintelligible to speakers of the Zarma dialect of Niger, according to the Ethnologue.

For linguists, a major point of interest in the Songhay languages has been the difficulty of determining their genetic affiliation; they are commonly taken to be Nilo-Saharan, as defined by Greenberg in 1963, but this classification remains controversial. Dimmendaal (2008) believes that for now it is best considered an independent language family.

The name Songhay is historically neither an ethnic nor a linguistic designation, but a name for the ruling caste of the Songhay Empire. Under the influence of French language usage, speakers in Mali have increasingly been adopting it as an ethnic self-designation; however, other Songhay-speaking groups identify themselves with other ethnic terms, such as Zarma (Djerma) or Isawaghen.

A few precolonial poems and letters composed in Songhay and written in the Arabic alphabet are extant in Timbuktu. However, Songhay is currently written in the Latin script.