The Zenaga are the surviving Berber-speaking population of southern Mauritania and the linguistic descendants of the medieval western Saharan Sanhaja. Their language, Tuḍḍungiyya in their own usage and Zenaga in the broader scholarly literature, is the most divergent of the surviving Berber varieties and the only one whose phonology is distinguished by the presence of a glottal stop and a voiceless lateral fricative.
The community was historically distributed across the Adrar plateau, the Tagant, and the Atlantic coastal zone of Mauritania, in a population that during the medieval period contributed the demographic and military base of the Almoravid empire under Yusuf ibn Tashfin. The arrival of the Hassani Arab Banu Maqil populations from the thirteenth century onwards, and the subsequent confrontation that culminated in the seventeenth-century Char Bouba war, displaced the Zenaga from much of their historical territory and accelerated a long Arabisation that has produced the modern Hassani-monolingual majority of Mauritania.
The surviving speakers of Zenaga are concentrated in southern Mauritania around the towns of Boutilimit, Mederdra, and Tiguent, in a population estimated at fewer than five thousand active speakers and declining. Linguistic documentation has been undertaken by Catherine Taine-Cheikh and others since the 1970s; her dictionary and grammar (2008–2010) are the principal modern references for the language.
The Zenaga are conventionally treated alongside the Tuareg, the Mozabites, the Siwis, the Ghadamsi, and the Guanches as one of the principal "linguistic remnant" Berber populations whose language has not been revived under contemporary standardisation programmes and whose cultural future depends substantially on community-level transmission.