Zaghawa

Zaghawa is a Saharan language, spoken natively by at least 270,000 people. The language originates with the Zaghawa people, who call the language Beria. Today, most Zaghawa speakers live in Chad in the East Central Sahel region or the North-eastern region. There are also a notable number of speakers in Sudan, primarily in the North-western and Darfur regions. 

Zaghawa is a five-tone language with nine vowels. As is the case with many African languages, Zaghawa has been exclusively a spoken language throughout most of history. However, a Zaghawa script began to develop in the 1950s. This proposed alphabet adopted its glyphs from the brands different clans used on camels. The Zaghawa script also took influence from the Arabic script which was not well suited for Zaghawa. Adaptions have been made more recently to improve the alphabet, increasing its popularity among the Zaghawa community. Zaghawa has six dialects: Wegi, Kube, Dirong, Guruf, Brogat and Bidayat. The dialect Wegi has the largest number of speakers and is spoken by approximately 100,000 people. The Wegi clan make up most of the Zaghawa speakers in Sudan, but the dialect is not widely spoken in Chad. In Chad, Kuba and Bidayat are the most widely spoken with 25,000 and 15,000 speakers, respectively.