Tama is the language of the Tama people, spoken in the borderlands between eastern Chad, in the Ouaddai region, and western Sudan, in Darfur. It belongs to the small Taman group of languages, generally placed within the Eastern Sudanic branch of the Nilo-Saharan family, alongside a handful of close relatives spoken in the same area. Speaker numbers are uncertain; published estimates range from tens of thousands to a few hundred thousand, and the instability that has affected Darfur makes counting harder still. Tama is primarily an oral language with little written tradition, and most speakers are multilingual, using Chadian or Sudanese Arabic for trade and wider communication. Like many languages of the Chad-Sudan frontier it is thinly documented, and linguists regard the Taman group as a priority for further study.
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