Lameen Souag. Grammatical Contact in the Sahara: Arabic, Berber, and Songhay in Tabelbala and Siwa. PhD thesis, University of London, 2010.
Speaker Number Trend 3
Only about half of community members speak the language. Speaker numbers are decreasing steadily, but not at an accelerated pace.
Domain Of Use 3
Used mainly in the home and/or with family, but remains the primary language of these domains for many community members.
Transmission 2
Most adults in the community are speakers, but children generally are not.
Speakers
Location and Context
"Kwarandzyey (kʷara n dzyəy "village language", or lbəlbaliyya "Belbali"; Korandjé in earlier literature) is spoken by about 3000 people, called Belbalis, from the villages of Kwara (Zaouia), Ifrənyu (Cheraia), and Yami (Makhlouf) in the oasis of Tabelbala in southwestern Algeria, about halfway between Bechar and Tindouf. There are significant numbers of Belbalis in Tindouf, and smaller numbers in Bechar and Oran."
Arabic to their young children, and in Ifrənyu people in their twenties can be found who have only a very limited passive knowledge of Kwarandzyey. The djemaa (council of elders) of Ifrənyu collectively resolved to give up Kwarandzyey in the 1970s, hoping to
improve their children's educational chances by making sure they knew Arabic from the start (Tabelbala has had a government school since just before independence); the people of Kwara (Zaouia) followed suit in the 1980s. Nonetheless, Kwara's children
have continued to acquire Kwarandzyey in their early teens from older teenagers."