Ghadamès language

Ghadamès also called Ghadamsi or Ghadamsian is a Berber language that is spoken in, and named after, the oasis town of Ghadames in Nalut District, western Libya.

Research

Ghadamès language materials have been gathered by two linguists. The first materials were published in 1903 and 1904 by Adolphe de Calassanti Motylinski. A more copious and reliable source is provided by the works of White Father Jacques Lanfry, who stayed in Ghadames from 1944 to 1945 and who published his main works in 1968 and 1973. No new research has been undertaken on location since then. Recently, Kossmann has published a modern grammar of Ghadamès based on Lanfry’s materials.

Number of speakers

Lanfry mentions the number of c. 4,000 speakers as an optimistic estimate. The actual number of speakers is not known with certainty. Ethnologue cites a number of 13,100 speakers in 2016, including 2,000 living outside the area. However, this number reflects the total number of inhabitants of Ghadames, who are not all native speakers of Ghadamès, while the number of 2,000 emigrant speakers is based on a very old source. Ethnologue classifies the language as 6b.

The language

Ghadamès is a Berber language on its own, preserving several unique phonological and morphological features, and the Ghadamès lexicon, as recorded by Lanfry, shows relatively little influence from Arabic. There is as yet no consensus on the classification of Ghadamès within the Berber language group. Aikhenvald and Militarev group it as Eastern Berber, and Kossmann specifically groups it together with Awjila. Ethnologue classifies it as East Zenati.

Phonology

Consonants

Like other Berber languages and Arabic, Ghadamès has both pharyngealized and plain dental consonants. Gemination is contrastive. Consonants listed between brackets occur only very sporadically.

Vowels

Most Berber languages have just three phonemic vowels. Ghadamès, like Tamasheq, has seven vowels.

	Front	Central	Back
Close
Close-mid
Mid
Near-open
Open

Basic vocabulary

Below is the Leipzig-Jakarta list for Ghadames, extracted from Lanfry. Lanfry's unconventional transcription has been adapted to modern usage. Symbols are equivalent to IPA. Lanfry's length notation on vowels probably represents lexical stress.

1	fire
2	nose
3	to go	with verbal deictic "thither"
4	water
5	mouth
6	tongue
7	blood
8	bone
9	pronoun	,
10	root	"root of plant"
11	to come	with verbal deictic "hither"
12	breast	,
13	rain
14	pronoun
15	name
16	louse
17	wing
18	flesh/meat
19	hand/arm	"hand", "arm"
20	fly
21	night
22	ear
23	neck
24	far
25	to do/make	"to do, achieve" < Arabic, "to put, to make"
26	house	,
27	stone/rock
28	bitter	"to be bitter"
29	to say
30	tooth	"incisor", "molar", "canine"
31	hair
32	big
33	one	,
34	who?
35	pronoun	,
36	to beat/hit
37	leg/foot
38	horn
39	this
40	fish
41	yesterday
42	to drink
43	black	"to be black"
44	navel
45	to stand	"to be standing", "to stand up"
46	to bite
47	back	,
48	wind	"wind, odour"
49	smoke
50	what?	,
51	child	,
52	egg
53	to give
54	new
55	to burn
56	not	,
57	good	< Arabic
58	to know
59	knee
60	sand
61	to laugh
62	to hear
63	soil	"earth, soil"
64	leaf	"leaf of tree"
65	red	"red one"
66	liver
67	to hide
68	skin/hide	"animal skin"
69	to suck
70	to carry	"to carry, bring", "to carry, lift"
71	ant
72	heavy	"to be heavy"
73	to take	"to take", "to seize, hold"
74	old	, "to be old, elderly "
75	to eat
76	thigh
77	thick	"to be thick"
78	long	"to be long"
79	to blow
80	wood	" wood"
81	to run
82	to fall
83	eye
84	ash
85	tail	< Arabic?
86	dog
87	to cry/weep
88	to tie
89	to see
90	sweet
91	rope
92	shade/shadow
93	bird
94	salt
95	small	"to be small"
96	wide
97	star
98	in	,
99	hard
100	to grind/crush	"to grind", "to crush "