Ouargli, or Teggargrent, is a Zenati

Zenati languages

The Zenati languages, named after the medieval Zenata tribe, are a subgroup of the Northern Berber language family, spoken in North Africa, proposed in Destaing They are distributed across the central Maghreb, from northeastern Morocco to just west of Algiers, and the northern Sahara, from...

 Berber

Berber languages

The Berber languages are a family of languages indigenous to North Africa, spoken from Siwa Oasis in Egypt to Morocco , and south to the countries of the Sahara Desert...

 variety spoken in the oases of Ouargla

Ouargla

Ouargla is the capital city of Ouargla province, in the Sahara Desert, in southern Algeria. It has a flourishing oil industry, and hosts one of Algeria's universities. The city had a population of 129,402 in 1998 ....

 (Wargrən) and N'Goussa

N'Goussa

N'Goussa is a district of Ouargla Province, Algeria. Its inhabitants speak Berber....

 (Ingusa) in Algeria

Algeria

Algeria , officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria , also formally referred to as the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of Northwest Africa with Algiers as its capital.In terms of land area, it is the largest country in Africa and the Arab...

. As of 1987, it had no more than 10,000 speakers; the Ethnologue

Ethnologue

Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a web and print publication of SIL International , a Christian linguistic service organization, which studies lesser-known languages, to provide the speakers with Bibles in their native language and support their efforts in language development.The Ethnologue...

 estimated only 5,000 speakers as of 1995. There are some differences between the dialects of Ouargla (Təggargrənt) and N'Goussa (Təggəngusit), notably in the position of pronominal clitic

Clitic

In morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that is grammatically independent, but phonologically dependent on another word or phrase. It is pronounced like an affix, but works at the phrase level...

s; within Ouargla, there are minor differences between the three tribes At-Brahim, At-Sisin and At-Waggin.

Speakers from Ouargla regard the varieties of Ouargla, N'Goussa, Temacine

Oued Righ Berber

Oued Righ Berber, or Temacine Tamazight, is a Zenati Berber variety spoken in some of the oases of the Oued Righ region around Touggourt in Algeria. As of 1893, it was spoken in Temacine, Blidet-Amor, Meggarine and Ghomra. The only published study of it is Basset . It is closely related to...

, Tumzabt (and possibly other Zenati varieties) as dialects of a single language, which they call twargrit, and, according to Delheure (1987:355), at Wargrən fəhhəmən d awəḥdi tawsint, "the Ouarglis understand Temacine very well."

The principal grammatical study is Biarnay (1908); a less detailed sketch is provided in Basset (1893). Its lexicon is fairly extensively documented in Delheure's (1987) dictionary The bilingual texts in Biarnay and Basset are more recently supplemented by the texts on daily life in Delheure (1988) and the folk tale collection in Delheure (1989); the latter, unlike other work on Ouargli, includes texts from N'Goussa as well.