Koyra Chiini or Western Songhay, is a variety of Songhai in Mali

Mali

Mali , officially the Republic of Mali , is a landlocked country in Western Africa. Mali borders Algeria on the north, Niger on the east, Burkina Faso and the Côte d'Ivoire on the south, Guinea on the south-west, and Senegal and Mauritania on the west. Its size is just over 1,240,000 km² with...

, spoken by about 200,000 people (as of 1999) along the Niger River

Niger River

The Niger River is the principal river of western Africa, extending about . Its drainage basin is in area. Its source is in the Guinea Highlands in southeastern Guinea...

 in Timbuktu

Timbuktu

Timbuktu , formerly also spelled Timbuctoo, is a town in the West African nation of Mali situated north of the River Niger on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. The town is the capital of the Timbuktu Region, one of the eight administrative regions of Mali...

 and upriver from it in the towns of Diré

Dire

As a location, Dire may refer to:*Diré, Mali*Dire – one of the 180 woredas in the Oromia Region of Ethiopia....

, Tonka

Tonka, Mali

Tonka is a town and commune of the Cercle of Goudam in the Tombouctou Region of Mali. The commune includes around 22 settlements. The commune lies to the north of the Niger River and includes Lake Oro, a seasonal lake that fills with water during the annual flood of the Niger River.-External...

, Goundam

Goundam

Goundam is a commune and town in north central Mali, in the Tombouctou Region. It is the capital of Goundam Cercle, one of five subdivisions of the Region. In the 2009 census the commune had a population of 16,253...

, and Niafunké

Niafunké

- External links :* Short album description and sample of Tulumba....

, as well as in the Saharan town of Araouane

Araouane

Araouane or Arawan is a small village in the Malian Sahara, lying north of Timbuktu on the caravan route to Taoudenni. The village once served as an entrepôt in the trans-Saharan trade....

 to its north. In this area, Koyra Chiini is the dominant language and the lingua franca

Lingua franca

A lingua franca is a language systematically used to make communication possible between people not sharing a mother tongue, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both mother tongues.-Characteristics:"Lingua franca" is a functionally defined term, independent of the linguistic...

, although minorities speaking Hassaniya

Hassaniya

Hassānīya is the variety of Arabic originally spoken by the Beni Hassān Bedouin tribes, who extended their authority over most of Mauritania and the Western Sahara between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. It has almost completely replaced the Berber languages spoken in this region...

 Arabic, Tamashek

Tuareg languages

Tuareg is a Berber language or family of very closely related languages and dialects spoken by the Tuareg Berbers, in large parts of Mali, Niger, Algeria, Libya and Burkina Faso, with a few speakers, the Kinnin, in Chad.- Description :Other Berber languages and Tamashaq are quite mutually...

, and Fulani are found. Djenné Chiini dʒɛnːɛ tʃiːni, the Songhai variety spoken in Djenné

Djenné

Djenné is an Urban Commune and town in the Inland Niger Delta region of central Mali. In the 2009 census the commune had a population of 32,944. Administratively it is part of the Mopti Region....

, is mutually comprehensible, but has noticeable differences with Koyra Chiini proper - in particular, two extra vowels (/ɛ/ and /ɔ/) and syntactic differences related to focalization. East of Timbuktu, Koyra Chiini gives way relatively abruptly to another Songhai language, Koyraboro Senni

Koyraboro Senni

Koyraboro Senni is a variety of Songhai in Mali, spoken by some 400,000 people along Niger River from Gourma-Rharous, east of Timbuktu, through Bourem, Gao, and Ansongo to the Mali–Niger border.The expression “koyra-boro senn-i” literally denotes “the language of the town dwellers” as opposed to...

.

Unlike most Songhai languages, Koyra Chiini has no phonemic tones

Tone (linguistics)

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...

, and has subject–verb–object word order rather than subject–object–verb. It has changed original z to j.