Tetserret is one of the last Berber languages to be recognised as distinct. As late as 1981, Bernus treated Tetserret as a dialect of Tuareg, and some early sources even confused it with the Northern
Songhay languages. The first published linguistic material on Tetserret was Drouin (1984), and only with Khamed Attayoub's (2001) thesis did it become clear how different Tetserret was from Tuareg. Tetserret is the only surviving Berber language to share a number of sound shifts with
Zenaga of
Mauritania. It also has non-Tuareg vocabulary found in other Berber languages. For example,
afagan (man) resembles
Shilha and
Central Atlas Tamazight of
Morocco;
ayddid (goatskin container for water) resembles
Ghadames of
Libya; and
awdoš (ox) recalls
Hassaniya Arabic. All speakers of Tetserret are bilingual in the
Tawellemmet language, which has influenced their language. As of 2011, Tetserret was no longer being spoken with children, and as such appears endangered. The language holds a certain level of prestige in its community, as a tool of spreading religion, such as it is 'almost a sin not to speak it', it is hard to evaluate the number of 'true' speakers, because there is a great shame in not speaking it within the community, leading to respondents exaggerating their knowledge of the language. ==Literature==