Tibesti Mountains in the context of "Dazaga language"

The Bodélé Depression (pronounced [bɔ.de.le]), located at the southern edge of the Sahara Desert in north central Africa, is the lowest point in Chad. It is 500 km long, 150 km wide and around 160 m deep. Its bottom lies about 155 meters above sea level. The dry endorheic basin is a major source of fertile dust essential for the Amazon rainforest, with some studies suggesting that it supplies over half of the nutrient-rich dust that supports the rainforest.

Dust storms from the Bodélé Depression occur on average about 100 days per year, one typical example being the massive dust storms that swept over West Africa and the Cape Verde Islands in February 2004. As the wind sweeps between the Tibesti and the Ennedi Mountains in Northern Chad, it is channeled across the depression. The dry bowl that forms the depression is marked by a series of ephemeral lakes, many of which were last filled during wetter periods of the Holocene.

The Toubou or Tubu (from Old Tebu, meaning "rock people") are an ethnic group native to the Tibesti Mountains that inhabit the central Sahara in northern Chad, southern Libya, northeastern Niger, and northwestern Sudan. They live either as herders and nomads or as farmers near oases. Their society is clan-based, with each clan having certain oases, pastures and wells.

The Toubou are generally divided into two closely related groups: the Teda (or Tuda, Téda, Toda, Tira) and the Daza (or Dazzaga, Dazagara, Dazagada). They are believed to share a common origin and speak the Tebu languages, which are from the Saharan branch of the Nilo-Saharan language family. Tebu is divided further into two closely related languages, called Tedaga (Téda Toubou) and Dazaga (Daza Toubou). Of the two groups, the Daza, found to the south of the Teda, are more numerous.

Daza (also known as Dazaga) is a Nilo-Saharan language spoken by the Daza people (a sub-group of the Toubou people inhabiting northern Chad and eastern Niger). The Daza are also known as the Gouran (Gorane) in Chad. Dazaga is spoken by around 700,000 people, primarily in the Djurab Desert region and the Borkou region, locally called Haya or Faya-Largeau northern-central Chad, in Kanem there is a lot of Daza around 300,000, the capital of the Dazaga people. Dazaga is spoken in the Tibesti Mountains of Chad (606,000 speakers), in eastern Niger near N'guigmi and to the north (93,200 speakers). It is also spoken to a smaller extent in Libya and in Sudan, where there is a community of 3,000 speakers in the city of Omdurman. There's also a small diaspora community working in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

The two primary dialects of the Dazaga language are Daza and Kara, but there are several other mutually intelligible dialects, including Kaga, Kanobo, Taruge and Azza. It is closely related to the Tedaga language, spoken by the Teda, the other out of the two Toubou people groups, who reside primarily in the Tibesti Mountains of northern Chad and in southern Libya near the city of Sabha.