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Berber languages

Published on Monday, June 5th 2006. Edited by Dud Fednilpot, Fort Huachuca, United States.

Berber

Geographic distribution: North Africa (mainly Morocco and Algeria; smaller communities in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Mauritania, Niger Western Sahara and Mali) and also in France, Belgium, Spain, United States and Canada

Genetic classification: Afro-Asiatic  Berber

Subdivisions:

Guanche

Zenaga

Eastern Berber group

Northern Berber group

Tamasheq group

ISO 639-2: ber

Location of Berber varieties in Northern Africa

Location of Berber varieties in Northern Africa.

         Tashelhiyt          Central Morocco Tamazight

         Tarifit          Chenoua

         Kabyle          Chaouia

         Tamasheq          Saharan Berber

The Berber languages (Berber: , Tamazight) are a group of closely related languages mainly spoken in Morocco, Algeria, Niger, Mali and Libya. A relatively sparse population extends into the whole Sahara and the northern part of the Sahel. They belong to the Afro-Asiatic languages phylum. There is a strong movement among speakers of the closely related northern Berber languages to unite them into a single standard Tamazight.

Among the Berber languages / Tamazight are Central Morocco Tamazight, Tarifit or Riffi (northern Morocco), Kabyle (Algeria) and Tashelhiyt (central Morocco). Tamazight has been a written language, on and off, for over 2000 years, although the tradition has been frequently disrupted by various invasions. It was first written in the Tifinagh alphabet, still used by the Tuareg; the oldest dated inscription is from about 200 BC. Later, between about 1000 AD and 1500 AD, it was written in the Arabic alphabet (particularly by the Shilha of Morocco); since the 20th century, it has often been written in the Latin alphabet, especially among the Kabyle. A variant of the Tifinagh alphabet was recently made official in Morocco, while the Latin alphabet is quasi-official in Algeria and official in Mali and Niger; however, both Tifinagh and Arabic are still widely used in Mali and Niger, while Tifinagh and Latin scripts are increasingly being used in Morocco.

After independence, all the Maghreb countries to varying degrees pursued a policy of “Arabization”, aimed primarily at displacing French from its colonial position as the dominant language of education and literacy. But under this policy the use of Amazigh / Berber languages has been suppressed or even banned. This state of affairs has been contested by Berbers in Morocco and Algeria — especially Kabylie — and is now being addressed in both countries by introducing Berber language in some schools and by recognizing Berber as a “national language” in Algeria, though not an official one. No such measures have been taken in the other Maghreb countries, whose Berber populations are much smaller. In Mali and Niger, there are a few schools that teach partially in Tamasheq.

Nomenclature

The term Berber has been used in Europe since at least the 17th century, and is still used today. It was borrowed from the Arabic designation for these populations, البربر, el-Barbar. The latter might have been derived from the Arabic or Persian words “barbakh”/“barbar” and “khanah”, a house or guard on the wall. Despite the phonetic resemblance, the term has probably nothing to do with the Latin barbarus, which was used by the Romans to refer to non-Roman tribes of the Roman Empire (see Barbarian). Although the Berbers obviously fell under that definition, Romans usually called them under more specific names, such as “Numidians” or “Mauri”. The Egyptians referred to them as Rebu (= Libu), or Meshwesh, the ancient Greeks as “Libyans”, the Byzantines as “Mazikes”.

As far as languages are concerned, the term Tamazight has recently gained ground over Berber, particularly to refer to Northern Berber languages, just like “Amazigh” is used to refer to a native Berber speaker. In Western languages Tamazight can also (somewhat misleadingly) be used specifically to refer to the Central Morocco Tamazight dialect, closely related to Tashelhiyt. Etymologically, it means “language of the free” or “of the noblemen.” Traditionally, the term “tamazight” (in various forms: “thamazighth”, “tamasheq”, “tamajeq”, “tamahaq”) was used by many Berber groups to refer to the language they spoke, including the Middle Atlas, the Rif, Sened in Tunisia, and the Tuareg. However, other terms were used by other groups; for instance, many parts of western Algeria called their language “taznatit” or Zenati, while the Kabyles called theirs “thaqvaylith”, the inhabitants of Siwa “tasiwit”, and the Zenaga. In Tunisia, the local Berber languages are usually referred to as “Shelha”. “Tuddhungiya”. Around the turn of the century, it was reported that the Zenata of the Rif called their language “Zenatia” specifically to distinguish it from the “Tamazight” spoken by the rest of the Rif.

One group, the Linguasphere Observatory, has attempted to introduce the neologism “Tamazic languages” to refer to the Berber languages.

Origin

Tamazight is a member of the Afro-Asiatic language family (formerly called Hamito-Semitic), along with such languages as Hausa, Hebrew, Arabic, and Maltese.

Population

The exact population of Berber speakers is hard to ascertain, since most North African countries do not record language data in their censuses. The Ethnologue provides a useful academic starting point; however, its bibliographic references are inadequate, and it rates its own accuracy at only B-C for the area. Early colonial censuses may provide better documented figures for some countries; however, these are also very much out of date.

“Few census figures are available; all countries (Algeria and Morocco included) do not count Berber languages. The 1972 Niger census reported Tuareg, with other languages, at 127,000 speakers. Population shifts in location and number, effects of urbanization and education in other languages, etc., make estimates difficult. In 1952 A. Basset (LLB.4) estimated the number of Berberophones at 5,500,000. Between 1968 and 1978 estimates ranged from eight to thirteen million (as reported by Galand, LELB 56, pp. 107, 123-25); Voegelin and Voegelin (1977, p. 297) call eight million a conservative estimate. In 1980, S. Chaker estimated that the Berberophone populations of Kabylie and the three Moroccan groups numbered more than one million each; and that in Algeria, 3,650,000, or one out of five Algerians, speak a Berber language (Chaker 1984, pp. 8-9).”

This nomenclature is common in linguistic publications, but is significantly complicated by local usage: thus Tachelhit is sub-divided into Tachelhit of the Dra valley, Tasusit (the language of the Souss) and several other (mountain)-dialects. Moreover, linguistic boundaries are blurred, such that certain dialects cannot accurately be described as either Central Morocco Tamazight (spoken in the Central and eastern Atlas area) or Tachelhit.

Mohamed Chafik claims 80% of Moroccans are Berbers. It is not clear, however, whether he means “speakers of Berber languages” or “people of Berber descent”.

Tamasheq: 250,000 Tamajaq: 190,000

Tawallamat Tamajaq: 450,000 Tayart Tamajeq: 250,000 Tahaggart Tamahaq: 20,000

Thus, judging by the not necessarily reliable Ethnologue, the total number of speakers of Berber languages in the Maghreb proper appears to lie anywhere between 14 and 20 million, depending on which estimate is accepted; if we take Basset’s estimate, it could be as high as 25 million. The vast majority are concentrated in Morocco and Algeria. The Tuareg of the Sahel add another million or so.

Grammar

Nouns in Berber languages / Tamazight vary in gender (masculine vs feminine), in number (singular vs plural) and in state (free state vs construct state). In the case of the masculine, nouns generally begin with one of the three vowels of Berber, a, u or i (in standardised orthography, /e/ represents a schwa /ə/ inserted for reasons of pronunciation):

afus “hand” argaz “man” udem “face” ul “heart” ixf “head” iles “tongue”

While the masculine is unmarked, the feminine (also used to form diminutives and singulatives, like an ear of wheat) is marked with the circumfix t…t. Feminine plural takes a prefix t… :

afus → tafust udem → tudemt ixf → tixft ifassn → tifetussin

Berber languages / Tamazight have two types of number: singular and plural, of which only the latter is marked. Plural has three forms according to the type of nouns. The first, “regular” type is known as the “external plural”; it consists in changing the initial vowel of the noun, and adding a suffix -n:

afus → ifasen “hands” argaz → irgazen “men” ixf → ixfawen “heads” ul → ulawen “hearts”

The second form of the plural is known as the “broken plural”. It involves only a change in the vowels of the word:

adrar → idurar “mountain” agadir → igudar “wall” abaγus → ibuγas “monkey”

The third type of plural is a mixed form: it combines a change of vowels with the suffix -n:

izi → izan “fly” azur → izuran “root” iziker → izakaren “rope”

Berber languages also have two types of states or cases of the noun, organized ergatively: one is unmarked, while the other serves for the subject of a transitive verb and the object of a preposition, among other contexts. The former is often called free state, the latter construct state. The construct state of the noun derives from the free state through one of the following rules: The first involves a vowel alternation, whereby the vowel a becomes u :

argaz → urgaz amγar → umγar adrar → udrar

The second involves the loss of the initial vowel, in the case of some feminine nouns:

tamγart → temγart “old women” tamdint → temdint “town” tarbat → terbat “girl”

The third involves the addition of a semi-vowel (w or y) word-initially:

asif → wasif “river” adu → wadu “wind” iles → yiles “tongue” uccen → wuccen “wolf”

Finally, some nouns do not change for free state:

taddart → taddart “village” tuccent → tuccent “female wolf”

The following table gives the forms for the noun amγar “old man”:

masculine feminine

default agent default agent

singular amγar umγar tamγart tmγart

plural imγaren yimγaren timγarin tmγarin

Subclassification

Modern Berber Languages

Modern Berber Languages

Subclassification of the Berber languages is made difficult by their mutual closeness; Maarten Kossmann (1999) describes it as two dialect continua, Northern Berber and Tuareg, and a few peripheral languages, spoken in isolated pockets largely surrounded by Arabic, that fall outside these continua, namely Zenaga and the Libyan and Egyptian varieties. Within Northern Berber, however, he recognizes a break in the continuum between Zenati languages and their non-Zenati neighbors; and in the east, he recognizes a division between Ghadames and Awjila on the one hand and El-Foqaha, Siwa, and Djebel Nefusa on the other. The implied tree is:

There is so little data available on Guanche that any classification is necessarily uncertain; however, it is almost universally acknowledged as Berber on the basis of the surviving glosses. Much the same can be said of the language, sometimes called “Numidian”, used in the Libyan or Libyco-Berber inscriptions around the turn of the Common Era, whose alphabet is the ancestor of Tifinagh.

The Ethnologue, mostly following Aikhenvald and Militarev (1991), subdivides it somewhat differently:

Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berber_languages”



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