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Afro-Asiatic - Berber
The Berber languages (or Tamazight) are a group of closely related languages mainly spoken in Morocco and Algeria. A very 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 Berbers to unify the closely related northern Berber languages into a
single standard, Tamazight.
Among the Berber languages are Tarifit
or Riffi (northern Morocco), Kabyle (Algeria) and Tamazight (central Morocco). Tamazight has been a written language, on and off, for almost 3000 years;
however, this 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 1000 BC and 1500 BC, it was written in the Arabic alphabet (particularly by the Shilha of Morocco); in this century, it is often
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 official in Algeria, Mali, and Niger; however, both Tifinagh and Arabic are still widely used
in Mali and Niger, while Latin and Arabic are still widely 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 which teaching, and use in certain highly public
spheres, of both Berber languages and Maghrebi Arabic dialect have
been suppressed as well. This state of affairs was protested by Berbers in Morocco
and Algeria - especially Kabylie - and is
now being addressed in both countries by introducing Berber language education and by recognizing Berber as a "national
language", though not necessarily 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.
Origin
Tamazight (the Berber language/s) is a member of the Afro-Asiatic language family (formerly called Hamito-Semitic.) Traditional genealogists often
considered the Berbers as Arabs that immigrated from Yemen; for this reason, some considered Tamazight to derive from Arabic. For political reasons, the converse view has occasionally been suggested: Dr M. A'ashi, for instance, wrote "Tamazight is
older then the Semitic languages. It is possible that the Semitic languages are even branches of Tamazight". However, both views
are rejected by most linguists, who regard Semitic and Berber as two separate branches of Afro-Asiatic; according to Prof.
Karl Prasse, for instance, there
are only three hundred cognates between Tamazight and the Semitic languages (although there are, of course, far more loanwords.)
Grammar
The Berber languages have two 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. They also have two genders, masculine (unmarked) and feminine
(marked with reflexes of the prefix t-). These are illustrated (in Latin transcription) for the noun amghar
"old man, sheikh":
|
masculine |
feminine |
|
default |
agent |
default |
agent |
| singular |
amghar |
wemghar |
tamghart |
temghart |
| plural |
imgharen |
yemgharen |
timgharin |
temgharin |
Subclassification
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, following Aikhenvald and Militarev (1991), subdivides it somewhat differently:
- See also: Berber
External link
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