Siwi language

Siwi (also known as Siwan or Siwa Berber; endonym: Jlan n isiwan) is the easternmost Berber language, spoken in the western Egyptian desert by an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people in the oases of Siwa and Gara, near the Libyan border.

Siwi is the normal language of daily communication among the Egyptian Berbers of Siwa and Gara, but because it is not taught at local schools, used in the media nor recognised by the Egyptian government, its long-term survival may be threatened by contacts with outsiders and by the use of Egyptian Arabic in mixed marriages; nearly all Siwis today learn to speak Egyptian Arabic as a second language from an early age.

Siwi has been heavily influenced by Arabic, notably Egyptian and Bedouin, but also earlier stages of Arabic.

Siwi is the only Berber language indigenous to Egypt and is natively spoken further east than any other Berber variety of North Africa. Within Berber, it stands out for a number of unusual linguistic features, including the collapse of gender distinctions in the plural, the absence of dedicated negative forms of the verb, the use of full finite agreement on the verb in subject relativization, the use of la for sentential negation and the borrowing from Arabic of a productive comparative form for adjectives. Siwi also shows a typological feature that is strikingly rare, not only regionally but also worldwide: addressee agreement on demonstratives.

Classification

Siwi was traditionally associated with the Zenati subgroup of Berber, following the 15th-century historian al-Maqrizi as well as Destaing, who treated both as members of a groupe du Nord (northern group), on the basis of similarities in the verbal system. Vycichl notes that it shares the feature of prefix vowel reduction with Zenati. Aikhenvald and Militarev, followed by Ethnologue, placed Siwi in an Eastern Berber group, along with Awjila and Sokna in eastern and central Libya. Kossmann links it with Sokna and the Nafusi dialect cluster of western Libya and Tunisia, but not with Awjila.