Tamazight

Story

Tamazight is the collective name for the Berber languages of the Afroasiatic family, spoken by the Amazigh people across the breadth of North Africa from the Atlantic coast to the Siwa Oasis in Egypt. Its writing system, Tifinagh, is one of the oldest scripts indigenous to Africa, with inscriptions found across the Sahara and North African coastline dating back roughly 3,000 years, descended from the ancient Libyco-Berber script. For most of the twentieth century Tamazight was suppressed in favour of Arabic and French, but it was recognised as an official language of Morocco in 2011 and of Algeria in 2016, and Neo-Tifinagh was standardised and added to Unicode for broader digital use. The Tuareg women of the Sahara have been the principal custodians of the traditional Tifinagh script for generations, teaching it within their communities even during the decades of official suppression.

At a glance

• Also known as: ⵜⴰⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⵜ
• Family: Afroasiatic
• Region: North Africa
• Speakers: 25M (total speakers across all berber varieties: approximately 14 million in morocco and roughly 8 to 10 million in algeria, plus diaspora; 25 million is a conservative combined estimate)
• Writing system: Tifinagh (also Latin and Arabic script)
• Greeting: Azul (hello, literally beside my heart)

Spoken in

Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Mali, Niger, Mauritania

Common questions