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The Songhay, Songhai or Ayneha [3] [4] languages ( [sõʁaj], [soŋaj] or [soŋoj]) are a group of closely related languages / dialects centred on the middle stretches of the Niger River in the West African countries of Mali, Niger, Benin, Burkina Faso and Nigeria. In particular, they are spoken in the cities of Timbuktu, Djenné, Niamey and Gao.
- Nilo-Saharan?Songhay–Saharan?Songhay
The Songhai people ( autonym: Ayneha) are an ethnolinguistic group in West Africa who speak the various Songhai languages. Their history and lingua franca is linked to the Songhai Empire which dominated the western Sahel in the 15th and 16th century. Predominantly adherents of Islam, the Songhai are primarily located in Niger and Mali within ...
- 406,000 (2.9%)
- 5,106,423 (21.2%)
- 1,984,114 (5.9%)
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Songhai languages, group of closely related languages generally assumed to constitute the primary branch of the Nilo-Saharan language family. The Songhai languages are spoken mainly along the Niger River, from Djenné and Timbuktu in Mali eastward as far as Benin, with extensions into adjacent countries. At least six varieties are usually ...
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Songhai proper ( Songhay, Sangwai or Sonrai) are an ethnic group in the northwestern corner of Niger's Tillaberi Region, an area historically known in the country as Songhai. [3] They are a subgroup of the broader Songhai group. Even though the Songhais have so much in common with the Zarma, to the extent that some Songhais may refer to ...
- 1,227,499
Songhay is mostly a tonal, SOV group of languages, an exception being the divergent Koyra Chiini of Timbuktu, which is non-tonal and uses SVO order. Songhay has a morpheme -ndi which marks either the causative or the agentless passive. Verbs can even take two instances of the morpheme, one for each meaning.
48.1 Introduction. Songhay is a language family of the West African Sahel region with more than four million speakers, distributed mainly in western Niger and northeastern Mali along the Niger river, but including outlying pockets scattered as far afield as Algeria, Ghana, and Sudan. In spite of this small population, Songhay’s role in ...
History of research on the Songhay language. Although the study of ancient Arabic manuscripts reveals some writings in the Fulfulde (Fulani) and soŋay (Songhay) languages, the systematic analysis of soŋay did not begin until the end of the nineteenth century, at the beginning of the colonial period. Delafosse is interested in the geopolitics ...
