The Zenati languages are a branch of the Northern Berber language family of North Africa. They were named after the medieval ZenataBerbertribal confederation. They were first proposed in the works of French linguist Edmond Destaing . Zenata dialects are distributed across the central Maghreb, from northeastern Morocco to just west of Algiers, and the northern Sahara, from southwesternAlgeria around Bechar to Zuwara in Libya. In much of this range, they are limited to discontinuous pockets in a predominantly Arabic-speaking landscape. The most widely spoken Zenati languages are Riffian in northeastern Morocco and Shawiya in eastern Algeria, each of which have over 2 million speakers.
According to Kossmann, common innovations defining the Zenati languages include:
The vowel a- in nominal prefixes is dropped in a number of words when it precedes CV, where C is a single consonant and V is a full vowel. For example, afus "hand" is replaced with fus.
Verbs whose original aorist forms end in -u while their perfect forms end in -a end up with -a in the aorist as well, leaving the aorist / perfect distinction unmarked for these verbs. For example, *ktu "forget", Siwittu, becomes Ouargli tta.
Verbs consisting of two consonants with no vowel other than schwa fall into two classes elsewhere in Berber: one where a variable final vowel appears in the perfect form, and one which continues to lack a final vowel in the perfect. In Zenati, the latter class has been entirely merged into the former in the perfect, with the single exception of the negative perfect of *əɣ s "want". For example, Kabylegər "throw", pf. -gər, corresponds to Ouargli gər, pf. -gru.
Proto-Berber *-əβ has become -i in Zenati. For example, *arəβ "write" becomes ari.
Proto-Berber palatalised k´ and g´, corresponding to k and g in non-Zenati varieties, become š and ž in Zenati For example, k´ăm "you " becomes šəm.
In addition to the correspondence of k and g to š and ž, Chaker, while expressing uncertainty about the linguistic coherence of Zenati, notes as shared Zenati traits:
A final -u in the perfect of two-consonant verbs, rather than -a
These characteristics identify a more restricted subset of Berber than those previously mentioned, mainly northern Saharan varieties; they exclude, for example, Chaoui and all but the easternmost Riff dialects.
