BERBER LANGUAGES

also called Berbero-Libyan languages, group of languages that make up one of the constituent branches of the Afro-Asiatic (formerly Hamito-Semitic) language family; the other branches are Egyptian, Semitic, Cushitic, and Chadic. The Berber languages are spoken in scattered areas throughout northern Africa from Egypt westward to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Niger River northward to the Mediterranean Sea. Altogether some 11,000,000 people speak Berber languages. The Berber (Berbero-Libyan) branch is represented by a multitude of New Stage Berber dialects distributed all over North Africa, from the Siwa Oasis in the Arab Republic of Egypt to Senegal (about 11,000,000 speakers). The more important dialect clusters are Tamashek (Tuareg), in the central Sahara and south of the Niger; Shawia and Kabyle (Zouaouah), both in Algeria; Rif and Tamazight, predominantly in Morocco; Shluh (Tashelhayt or Shilha), in Morocco and Mauritania; and Zenaga, in Mauritania and northern Senegal. Little is known of ancient Libyan, also called Numidian. It is attested by inscriptions found in Tunisia, Algeria, and elsewhere, dating from the times of the Roman Empire and written in a native consonantal quasi-alphabetic script still surviving in a modified form among the Tuaregs of Sahara. Whether the extinct language of the Guanches in the Canary Islands and of the Iberians of Spain belonged to the Berber branch or even to Hamito-Semitic is doubtful. Igor Mikhailovich Diakonoff Additional reading Two works by Andre Basset, Handbook of African Languages, vol. 1, La Langue berbre (1952), and Articles de dialectologie berbre (1959), are useful introductions. The article by Joseph R. Applegate, The Berber Languages, in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. 6 (1970), pp. 586608, is followed by an extensive classified bibliography, pp. 608661. Igor Mikhailovich Diakonoff