Misplaced Pages

#892107

117-488: Central Atlas Tamazight is one of the most-spoken Berber languages, along with Tachelhit , Kabyle , Riffian , Shawiya and Tuareg . In Morocco, it comes second as the most-spoken after Tachelhit . All five languages may be referred to as "Tamazight", but Central Atlas speakers are the only ones who use the term exclusively. As is typical of Afroasiatic languages, Tamazight has a series of " emphatic consonants " (realized as pharyngealized ), uvulars , pharyngeals and lacks

234-703: A templatic morphology , and a causative morpheme /s/ (the latter also found in other macrofamilies, such as the Niger–Congo languages ). Within Berber, Central Atlas Tamazight belongs, along with neighbouring Tashelhiyt , to the Atlas branch of the Northern Berber subgroup. Tamazight is in the middle of a dialect continuum between Riff to its north-east and Shilha to its south-west. The basic lexicon of Tamazight differs markedly from Shilha, and its verbal system

351-495: A "Moroccan character", and uncommon names, including some Berber ones used in the Central Atlas, are often rejected by the civil registry. Until the 20th century Tamazight, like many other Berber languages but in contrast with neighbouring Tashelhiyt , was basically unwritten (although sporadic cases, using Arabic script, are attested.) It was preserved through oral use in rural areas, isolated from urban hubs. Scholars from

468-647: A French-Spanish protectorate (under French and Spanish military occupation), leaving the Alaouite monarchy but establishing a French military presence in the Atlas region and installing a French commissioner-general. However, the Berber tribes of the Middle Atlas, as in other areas, put up stiff military resistance to French rule, lasting until 1933 in the case of the Ait Atta . After Morocco's independence in 1956,

585-501: A century. A problem with the work is its use of an over-elaborate, phonetic transcription which, while designed to be precise, generally fails to provide a transparent representation of spoken forms. Stumme also published a collection of Shilha fairy tales (1895, re-edited in Stroomer 2002). The next author to grapple with Shilha is Saïd Cid Kaoui (Saʿīd al-Sidqāwī, 1859-1910), a native speaker of Kabyle from Algeria. Having published

702-418: A construction-specific property rather than a language-specific property. Many languages show mixed accusative and ergative behaviour (for example: ergative morphology marking the verb arguments, on top of an accusative syntax). Other languages (called " active languages ") have two types of intransitive verbs—some of them ("active verbs") join the subject in the same case as the agent of a transitive verb, and

819-525: A day; and educational materials for schools are being developed. On October 17, 2001 King Mohammed VI sealed the decree ( Dahir 1–01–299) creating and organizing the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture (IRCAM). IRCAM's board is composed of Amazigh experts, artists, and activists, all of whom are appointed by the king. The institute, located in Rabat , has played an important role in the establishment of

936-482: A description of Judgment Day, in verse) and other texts. Modern Tashelhit literature has been developing since the end of the 20th century. The first attempt at a grammatical description of Shilha is the work of the German linguist Hans Stumme (1864–1936), who in 1899 published his Handbuch des Schilḥischen von Tazerwalt . Stumme's grammar remained the richest source of grammatical information on Shilha for half

1053-490: A dictionary of Tuareg (1894), he then turned his attention to the Berber languages of Morocco. His Dictionnaire français-tachelh’it et tamazir’t (1907) contains extensive vocabularies in both Shilha and Central Atlas Tamazight, in addition to some 20 pages of useful phrases. The work seems to have been put together in some haste and must be consulted with caution. On the eve of the First World War there appeared

1170-401: A fox in-the woods seen"), Dutch ( Hans vermoedde dat Jan Marie zag leren zwemmen - *"Hans suspected that Jan Marie saw to learn to swim") and Welsh ( Mae 'r gwirio sillafu wedi'i gwblhau - *"Is the checking spelling after its to complete"). In this case, linguists base the typology on the non-analytic tenses (i.e. those sentences in which the verb is not split) or on the position of

1287-453: A language with cases , the classification depends on whether the subject (S) of an intransitive verb has the same case as the agent (A) or the patient (P) of a transitive verb. If a language has no cases, but the word order is AVP or PVA, then a classification may reflect whether the subject of an intransitive verb appears on the same side as the agent or the patient of the transitive verb. Bickel (2011) has argued that alignment should be seen as

SECTION 10

#1732772451893

1404-663: A large enough body of native speakers not to be considered under risk of endangerment, although Tamazight speakers reportedly have a lower birth rate than the country of Morocco as a whole. As of the Moroccan constitutional referendum, 2011 , the Berber languages are official in Morocco alongside Arabic. In 1994, King Hassan II declared that a national Berber dialect would acquire a formal status; television broadcasts are summarized in Tamazight, as well as Shilha and Rif, three times

1521-572: A low sociolinguistic status, used mainly in the home, and rarely in official or formal contexts. Media broadcasts and music are available in it, and there is a policy of teaching it in schools, although it is not always applied. Of the Central Atlas Tamazight speakers, 40–45% are monolingual, while the others use Arabic as a second language. Monolingual speakers consist mostly of older generations and children. Women are more likely to be monolingual than men, since they typically stay in

1638-487: A male speaker is called a Šəlḥ , plural Šluḥ , and the language is Šəlḥa , a feminine derivation calqued on Taclḥiyt . The Moroccan Arabic names have been borrowed into English as a Shilh , the Shluh , and Shilha , and into French as un Chleuh , les Chleuhs , and chelha or, more commonly, le chleuh . The now-usual names Taclḥiyt and Iclḥiyn in their endonymic use seem to have gained

1755-406: A member of this set, while 51% of average languages (19-25) contain at least one member and 69% of large consonant inventories (greater than 25 consonants) contain a member of this set. It is then seen that complex consonants are in proportion to the size of the inventory. Vowels contain a more modest number of phonemes, with the average being 5–6, which 51% of the languages in the survey have. About

1872-628: A number of languages in North Africa and Southwest Asia including the Semitic languages , the Egyptian language , and the Chadic and Cushitic languages . Along with most other Berber languages, Tamazight has retained a number of widespread Afroasiatic features, including a two- gender system, verb–subject–object (VSO) typology , emphatic consonants (realized in Tamazight as pharyngealized),

1989-480: A purely graphical device employed to indicate that the preceding consonant is a syllable onset: [a.k(e)s.sab] , [a.ri.c(e)t.ta] . As Galand has observed, the notation of "schwa" in fact results from "habits which are alien to Shilha". And, as conclusively shown by Ridouane (2008), transitional vowels or "intrusive vocoids" cannot even be accorded the status of epenthetic vowels. It is therefore preferable not to write transitional vowels or "schwa", and to transcribe

2106-596: A rate of Tachelhit speakers higher than the national average: Souss-Massa, Guelmim–Oued Noun, Marrakech–Safi and Drâa–Tafilalet and Dakhla–Oued Ed Dahab. They concentrate 79% of the speakers. However, only two of them have a majority of Tachelhito speakers: Souss–Massa with 66% of its population (1,765,417 speakers) and Guelmim–Oued Noun with 50% (218,650 speakers). This rate drops to 26% for Marrakech–Safi (1,185,846 speakers), 22% for Drâa–Tafilalet (359,936 speakers) and 18% in Dakhla–Oued Ed Dahab (25,198 speakers). Like

2223-538: A relatively large degree of internal diversity, including whether spirantization occurs. Central Atlas Tamazight speakers refer to themselves as Amazigh (pl. Imazighen ), an endonymic ethnonym whose etymology is uncertain, but may translate as "free people". The term Tamazight , the feminine form of Amazigh , refers to the language. Both words are also used self-referentially by other Berber groups, although Central Atlas Tamazight speakers use them regularly and exclusively. In older studies, Central Atlas Tamazight

2340-411: A single dominant order. Though the reason of dominance is sometimes considered an unsolved or unsolvable typological problem, several explanations for the distribution pattern have been proposed. Evolutionary explanations include those by Thomas Givon (1979), who suggests that all languages stem from an SOV language but are evolving into different kinds; and by Derek Bickerton (1981), who argues that

2457-403: A small, practical booklet composed by Captain (later Colonel) Léopold Justinard (1878–1959), entitled Manuel de berbère marocain (dialecte chleuh) . It contains a short grammatical sketch, a collection of stories, poems and songs, and some interesting dialogues, all with translations. The work was written while the author was overseeing military operations in the region of Fès , shortly after

SECTION 20

#1732772451893

2574-401: A smooth transition. Figures for the number of speakers of Berber languages are generally a matter of estimates rather than linguistic censuses. At least a third of Moroccans seem to speak Berber languages,. Tamazight is estimated to be spoken by about 40~49% of Morocco's Berber-speakers, while Shilha commands 32~40% and Riff 20~25%. Tamazight, along with other Berber languages of Morocco, has

2691-426: A strong emphasis was laid on the country's Arab identity, and a national Arabic language educational system was instituted, in which Berber languages, including Middle Atlas Tamazight, had no place. However, in 1994 the government responded to Berber demands for recognition by decreeing that Berber should be taught and establishing television broadcasts in three Berber languages, including Central Atlas Tamazight. For

2808-427: A syllable or even a whole word. Historically Proto-Berber only had two pharyngealized phonemes ( /dˤ, zˤ/ ), but modern Berber languages have borrowed others from Arabic and developed new ones through sound shifts. In addition, Tamazight has uvular and pharyngeal consonants, as well as a lack of /p/ in its plosive inventory, unusual globally but characteristic of the region. All segments may be geminated except for

2925-434: A transitional vowel is audible following the onset of a vowelless syllable CC or CCC, if either of the flanking consonants, or both, are voiced, for example tigmmi [tiɡĭmmi] "house", amḥḍar [amɐ̆ʜdˤɐr] "schoolboy". In the phonetic transcriptions of Stumme (1899) and Destaing (1920, 1940), many such transitional vowels are indicated. Later authors such as Aspinion (1953), use the symbol ⟨e⟩ to mark

3042-483: A typical phonemic three-vowel system : These phonemes have numerous allophones, conditioned by the following environments: (# denotes word boundary, C̊ denotes C [−flat − /χ/ − /ʁ/ ] , Ç denotes C [+flat] , G denotes {Ç, /χ/ , /ʁ/ }) Phonetic schwa There is a predictable non-phonemic vowel inserted into consonant clusters, realized as [ ɪ̈ ] before front consonants (e.g. /b t d .../ ) and [ ə ] before back consonants (e.g. /k χ .../) . It

3159-466: A wide variety of genres (fairy tales, animal stories, taleb stories, poems, riddles, and tongue-twisters). A large number of oral texts and ethnographic texts on customs and traditions have been recorded and published since the end of the 19th century, mainly by European linguists. Shilha possesses an old literary tradition. Numerous texts written in Arabic script are preserved in manuscripts dating from

3276-486: A wordlist. Edmond Destaing (1872–1940) greatly advanced knowledge of the Shilha lexicon with his Etude sur la tachelḥît du Soûs. Vocabulaire français-berbère (1920) and his Textes berbères en parler des Chleuhs du Sous (Maroc) (1940, with copious lexical notes). Destaing also planned a grammar which was to complete the trilogy, but this was never published. Lieutenant-interpreter (later Commander) Robert Aspinion

3393-404: Is Neo-Tifinagh, rendered official by a Dahir of King Mohammed VI based on the recommendation of IRCAM. However, various Latin transcriptions have been used in a number of linguistic works describing Central Atlas Tamazight, notably the dictionary of Taïfi (1991). Central Atlas Tamazight has a contrastive set of "flat" consonants, manifested in two ways: Note that pharyngealization may spread to

3510-409: Is a chart showing the breakdown of voicing properties among languages in the aforementioned sample. Languages worldwide also vary in the number of sounds they use. These languages can go from very small phonemic inventories ( Rotokas with six consonants and five vowels) to very large inventories ( !Xóõ with 128 consonants and 28 vowels). An interesting phonological observation found with this data

3627-673: Is accounted for in the ‘Catalogue of the Languages of the Populations We Know’, 1800, by the Spanish Jesuit Lorenzo Hervás . Johann Christoph Adelung collected the first large language sample with the Lord's prayer in almost five hundred languages (posthumous 1817). More developed nineteenth-century comparative works include Franz Bopp 's 'Conjugation System' (1816) and Wilhelm von Humboldt 's ‘On

Central Atlas Tamazight - Misplaced Pages Continue

3744-408: Is also a distinction between labialized and plain dorsal obstruents . Consonant gemination or length is contrastive. The semivowels /w/ and /j/ have vocalic allophones [u] and [i] between consonants (C_C) and between consonant and pause (C_# and #_C). Similarly, the high vowels /u/ and /i/ can have consonantal allophones [w] and [j] in order to avoid a hiatus. In most dialects,

3861-490: Is apparent in Berber languages in central and northern Morocco and Algeria, as in many Middle Atlas dialects, it is more rare in High Atlas Tamazight speakers, and is absent in Tamazight speakers from the foothills of Jbel Saghro . Southern dialects (e.g. Ayt Atta ) may also be differentiated syntactically: while other dialects predicate with the auxiliary /d/ (e.g. /d argaz/ "it's a man"), Southern dialects use

3978-430: Is by excluding the subject from consideration. It is a well-documented typological feature that languages with a dominant OV order (object before verb), Japanese for example, tend to have postpositions . In contrast, VO languages (verb before object) like English tend to have prepositions as their main adpositional type. Several OV/VO correlations have been uncovered. Several processing explanations were proposed in

4095-462: Is currently no evidence of word stress in Tashlhiyt. Shilha has three phonemic vowels, with length not a distinctive feature. The vowels show a fairly wide range of allophones. The vowel /a/ is most often realized as [a] or [æ], and /u/ is pronounced without any noticeable rounding except when adjacent to w . The presence of a pharyngealized consonant invites a more centralized realization of

4212-425: Is defined by position within a sentence or presence of a preposition. For example, in some languages with bound case markings for nouns, such as Language X, varying degrees of freedom in constituent order are observed. These languages exhibit more flexible word orders, allowing for variations like Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) structure, as in 'The cat ate the mouse,' and Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) structure, as in 'The mouse

4329-691: Is more similar to Riff or Kabyle. Moreover, Tamazight has a greater amount of internal diversity than Shilha. Tamazight's dialects are divided into three distinct subgroups and geographic regions: those spoken in the Middle Atlas mountains; those spoken in the High Atlas mountains; and those spoken in Jbel Saghro and its foothills. Although the characteristic spirantization of /b/ > [β] ; /t/ > [θ] or [h] ; /d/ > [ð] ; /k/ > [ç] or [ʃ] ; and /ɡ/ > [ʝ] , [ʃ] or [j]

4446-499: Is non-contrastive and predictable, and falls on the last vowel in a word (including schwa). Examples: Central Atlas Tamazight grammar has many features typical of Afro-Asiatic languages , including extensive apophony in both the derivational and inflectional morphology, gender , possessive suffixes , VSO typology, the causative morpheme /s/, and the use of the status constructus . Tamazight nouns are inflected for gender, number, and state. Singular masculine nouns usually have

4563-454: Is one of the four most-spoken Berber languages, together with Kabyle , Tachelhit , and Riffian , and it comes second as the most-spoken Berber language after Tachelhit in Morocco. Differentiating these dialects is complicated by the fact that speakers of other languages may also refer to their language as 'Tamazight'. The differences between all three groups are largely phonological and lexical , rather than syntactic . Tamazight itself has

4680-425: Is seen in most languages or is probable in most languages. Universals, both absolute and statistical can be unrestricted, meaning that they apply to most or all languages without any additional conditions. Conversely, both absolute and statistical universals can be restricted or implicational, meaning that a characteristic will be true on the condition of something else (if Y characteristic is true, then X characteristic

4797-534: Is some ambiguity as to the eastern boundary of Central Atlas Tamazight. The dialect of the Ait Seghrouchen and Ait Ouarain tribes are commonly classed as Central Atlas Tamazight, and Ait Seghrouchen is reported to be mutually intelligible with the neighbouring Tamazight dialect of Ait Ayache. Genetically, however, they belong to the Zenati subgroup of Northern Berber, rather than to the Atlas subgroup to which

Central Atlas Tamazight - Misplaced Pages Continue

4914-578: Is sometimes referred to as "Braber" / "Beraber", a dialectical Arabic term, or its Tamazight equivalent "Taberbrit". This is related to the Standard Arabic and English term "Berber", used to refer to all Berber dialects/languages, though eschewed by many Berbers because its etymology is pejorative. Tamazight belongs to the Berber branch of the Afroasiatic language family; Afroasiatic subsumes

5031-669: Is spoken in an area covering around 100,000 square kilometres, making the language area approximately the size of Iceland , or the US state of Kentucky . The area comprises the western part of the High Atlas mountains and the regions to the south up to the Draa River , including the Anti-Atlas and the alluvial basin of the Sous River . The largest urban centres in the area are the coastal city of Agadir (population over 400,000) and

5148-513: Is suggested more recently that the left-right orientation is limited to role-marking connectives ( adpositions and subordinators ), stemming directly from the semantic mapping of the sentence. Since the true correlation pairs in the above table either involve such a connective or, arguably, follow from the canonical order, orientation predicts them without making problematic claims. Another common classification distinguishes nominative–accusative alignment patterns and ergative–absolutive ones. In

5265-452: Is that the larger a consonant inventory a language has, the more likely it is to contain a sound from a defined set of complex consonants (clicks, glottalized consonants, doubly articulated labial-velar stops, lateral fricatives and affricates, uvular and pharyngeal consonants, and dental or alveolar non-sibilant fricatives). Of this list, only about 26% of languages in a survey of over 600 with small inventories (less than 19 consonants) contain

5382-552: Is the author of Apprenons le berbère: initiation aux dialectes chleuhs (1953), an informative though somewhat disorganized teaching grammar. Aspinion's simple but accurate transcriptions did away with earlier phonetic and French-based systems. The first attempted description in English is Outline of the Structure of Shilha (1958) by American linguist Joseph Applegate (1925–2003). Based on work with native speakers from Ifni,

5499-399: Is true). An example of an implicational hierarchy is that dual pronouns are only found in languages with plural pronouns while singular pronouns (or unspecified in terms of number) are found in all languages. The implicational hierarchy is thus singular < plural < dual (etc.). Qualitative typology develops cross-linguistically viable notions or types that provide a framework for

5616-929: Is voiced before voiced consonants and voiceless before voiceless consonants, or alternatively it can be realized as a voiced or unvoiced consonant release. It also may be realized as the syllabicity of a nasal, lateral, or /r/. The occurrence of schwa epenthesis is governed morphophonemically. These are some of the rules governing the occurrence of [ə] : (# denotes word boundary, R denotes /l r m n/ , H denotes /h ħ ʕ w j/ , ℞ denotes R or H, and B denotes not R or H.) Examples: However note that word-initial initial /j, w/ are realized as /i, u/ before consonants. In word-medial or -final position [əj] , [əʝ] , and [əw] are realized as [ij] , [ij] , and [uw] respectively, and may become [i] and [u] in rapid speech. Tamazight in fact has numerous words without phonemic vowels , and those consisting entirely of voiceless consonants will not phonetically contain voiced vowels. [ə]

5733-563: Is written as ⟨ⴻ⟩ in neo-Tifinagh and as ⟨e⟩ in the Berber Latin alphabet . French publications tended to include [ə] in their transcriptions of Berber forms despite their predictability, perhaps due to the French vowel system . This can cause problems because alternations such as /iʁ(ə)rs/ 'he slaughtered' – /uriʁris/ 'he did not slaughter' would then have to be morphologically conditioned. Word stress

5850-630: The Arabic alphabet has also been used. The standard word order is verb–subject–object but sometimes subject–verb–object . Words inflect for gender, number and state, using prefixes, suffixes and circumfixes . Verbs are heavily inflected, being marked for tense , aspect , mode , voice , person of the subject and polarity , sometimes undergoing ablaut . Pervasive borrowing from Arabic extends to all major word classes, including verbs; borrowed verbs, however, are conjugated according to native patterns, including ablaut . Central Atlas Tamazight

5967-409: The Arabic suffix -iyy ) forms denominal nouns and adjectives. There are also variant forms Aclḥay and Taclḥayt , with -ay instead of -iy under the influence of the preceding consonant ḥ . The plural of Aclḥiy is Iclḥiyn ; a single female speaker is a Taclḥiyt (noun homonymous with the name of the language), plural Ticlḥiyin . In Moroccan colloquial Arabic,

SECTION 50

#1732772451893

6084-457: The Tifinagh script in Morocco. There are multiple political parties and cultural associations in Morocco that advocate for the advancement of Berber, calling for it to be recognized as an official language, used more extensively in the mass media, and taught more in schools. A legal issue affecting Tamazight speakers is restrictions on naming - Moroccan law stipulates that first names must have

6201-795: The construct state (contrasting with free state) to indicate possession or when the subject of a verb follows the verb. This is also used for nouns after numerals and some prepositions, as well as the conjunction /d-/ ('and'). The construct state is formed as follows: in masculines, initial /a/ becomes /u, wː, wa/ , initial /i/ becomes /i, j, ji/ , and initial /u/ becomes /wu/ . In feminines, initial /ta/ usually becomes /t/ , initial /ti/ usually becomes /t/ , and initial /tu/ remains unchanged. Examples (in Ayt Ayache): Central Atlas Tamazight's personal pronouns distinguish three persons and two genders. Pronouns appear in three forms: an independent form used in

6318-504: The endonym Taclḥiyt , IPA: [tæʃlħijt] ), is a Berber language spoken in southwestern Morocco . When referring to the language, anthropologists and historians prefer the name Shilha , which is in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Linguists writing in English prefer Tashelhit (or a variant spelling). In French sources the language is called tachelhit , chelha or chleuh . Shilha

6435-536: The 12th and 15th centuries, the Central Atlas, along with the rest of Morocco, successively fell within the domain of the Berber Almoravid , Almohad , and Marinid dynasties. Since the 17th century the region has acknowledged the rule of the Alaouite Dynasty , the current Moroccan royal family. However, effective control of the region was limited; until the 20th century much of the Central Atlas

6552-399: The 16th century. The earliest datable text is a compendium of lectures on the "religious sciences" ( lɛulum n ddin ) composed in metrical verses by Brahim u Ɛbdllah Aẓnag , who died in 1597. The best known writer in this tradition is Mḥmmd u Ɛli Awzal , author of al-Ḥawḍ "The Cistern" (a handbook of Maliki law in verse), Baḥr al-Dumūʿ "The Ocean of Tears" (an adhortation, with

6669-511: The 1961 conference on language universals at Dobbs Ferry . Speakers included Roman Jakobson , Charles F. Hockett , and Joseph Greenberg who proposed forty-five different types of linguistic universals based on his data sets from thirty languages. Greenberg's findings were mostly known from the nineteenth-century grammarians, but his systematic presentation of them would serve as a model for modern typology. Winfred P. Lehmann introduced Greenbergian typological theory to Indo-European studies in

6786-579: The 1970s. During the twentieth century, typology based on missionary linguistics became centered around SIL International , which today hosts its catalogue of living languages, Ethnologue , as an online database. The Greenbergian or universalist approach is accounted for by the World Atlas of Language Structures , among others. Typology is also done within the frameworks of functional grammar including Functional Discourse Grammar , Role and Reference Grammar , and Systemic Functional Linguistics . During

6903-481: The 1970s. Shilha speakers usually refer to their language as Taclḥiyt . This name is morphologically a feminine noun, derived from masculine Aclḥiy "male speaker of Shilha". Shilha names of other languages are formed in the same way, for example Aɛṛab "an Arab", Taɛṛabt "the Arabic language". The origin of the names Aclḥiy and Taclḥiyt has recently become a subject of debate (see Shilha people#Naming for various theories). The presence of

7020-598: The 1980s and 1990s for the above correlations. They suggest that the brain finds it easier to parse syntactic patterns that are either right or left branching , but not mixed. The most widely held such explanation is John A. Hawkins ' parsing efficiency theory, which argues that language is a non-innate adaptation to innate cognitive mechanisms. Typological tendencies are considered as being based on language users' preference for grammars that are organized efficiently, and on their avoidance of word orderings that cause processing difficulty. Hawkins's processing theory predicts

7137-463: The 8.8 million Amazighophones. It is also the Amazigh language that has the greatest geographical extension in the country. Its speakers are present in 1512 of the 1538 municipalities in the kingdom. This distribution is notably the result of a large diaspora of small traders who have settled throughout the country, but also of workers in search of employment opportunities. Five Moroccan regions have

SECTION 60

#1732772451893

7254-758: The Atlantic Ocean since before recorded history began in the region about 33 centuries ago. By the 5th century BC, the city of Carthage , founded by Phoenicians , had extended its hegemony across much of North Africa ; in the wake of the Punic Wars , Rome replaced it as regional hegemon. The Central Atlas region itself remained independent throughout the classical period, but occasional loanwords into Central Atlas Tamazight, such as ayugu , "plough ox", from Latin iugum , "team of oxen" and aẓalim "onion" < Punic bṣal-im , bear witness to their ancestors' contact with these conquerors. Arabs conquered

7371-666: The Difference in Human Linguistic Structure and Its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind’ (posthumous 1836). In 1818, August Wilhelm Schlegel made a classification of the world's languages into three types: (i) languages lacking grammatical structure, e.g. Chinese; (ii) agglutinative languages, e.g. Turkish; and (iii) inflectional languages, which can be synthetic like Latin and Ancient Greek, or analytic like French. This idea

7488-399: The English niece and knees . According to a worldwide sample of 637 languages, 62% have the voicing contrast in stops but only 35% have this in fricatives. In the vast majority of those cases, the absence of voicing contrast occurs because there is a lack of voiced fricatives and because all languages have some form of plosive (occlusive) , but there are languages with no fricatives. Below

7605-544: The Ighchan ethnic group of the Anti-Atlas, with comparative notes on Kabyle of Algeria and Tuareg of Niger. More recent, book-length studies include Jouad (1995, on metrics), Dell & Elmedlaoui (2002 and 2008, on syllables and metrics), El Mountassir (2009, a teaching grammar), Roettger (2017, on stress and intonation) and the many text editions by Stroomer (see also § Cited works and further reading ). There

7722-597: The Middle Atlas, as elsewhere in North Africa, usually wrote in the more prestigious Arabic language, rather than their vernacular. At present three writing systems exist for Berber languages, including Tamazight: Neo-Tifinagh , the Latin alphabet and the Arabic script . To some extent, the choice of writing system is a political one, with various subgroups expressing preference based on ideology and politics. The orthography used for government services including schooling

7839-547: The above table but also makes predictions for non-correlation pairs including the order of adjective, demonstrative and numeral in respect with the noun. This theory was based on corpus research and lacks support in psycholinguistic studies. Some languages exhibit regular "inefficient" patterning. These include the VO languages Chinese , with the adpositional phrase before the verb, and Finnish , which has postpositions. But there are few other profoundly exceptional languages. It

7956-486: The actual daily use of the language. The daily spoken language of Sophocles or Cicero might have exhibited a different or much more regular syntax than their written legacy indicates. The below table indicates the distribution of the dominant word order pattern of over 5,000 individual languages and 366 language families. SOV is the most common type in both although much more clearly in the data of language families including isolates . 'NODOM' represents languages without

8073-489: The area of modern-day Morocco and Algeria around the 7th century, prompting waves of Arab migration and Berber adoption of Islam . Particularly following the arrival of the Banu Hilal in modern-day Tunisia in the 11th century, more and more of North Africa became Arabic-speaking over the centuries. However, along with other high mountainous regions of North Africa, the Middle Atlas continued to speak Berber. Between

8190-547: The auxiliary. German is thus SVO in main clauses and Welsh is VSO (and preposition phrases would go after the infinitive). Many typologists classify both German and Dutch as V2 languages, as the verb invariantly occurs as the second element of a full clause. Some languages allow varying degrees of freedom in their constituent order, posing a problem for their classification within the subject–verb–object schema. Languages with bound case markings for nouns, for example, tend to have more flexible word orders than languages where case

8307-437: The basic order of subject , verb , and direct object in sentences: These labels usually appear abbreviated as "SVO" and so forth, and may be called "typologies" of the languages to which they apply. The most commonly attested word orders are SOV and SVO while the least common orders are those that are object initial with OVS being the least common with only four attested instances. In the 1980s, linguists began to question

8424-512: The cat ate.' To define a basic constituent order type in this case, one generally looks at frequency of different types in declarative affirmative main clauses in pragmatically neutral contexts, preferably with only old referents. Thus, for instance, Russian is widely considered an SVO language, as this is the most frequent constituent order under such conditions—all sorts of variations are possible, though, and occur in texts. In many inflected languages, such as Russian, Latin, and Greek, departures from

8541-415: The common properties of the world's languages. Its subdisciplines include, but are not limited to phonological typology, which deals with sound features; syntactic typology, which deals with word order and form; lexical typology, which deals with language vocabulary; and theoretical typology, which aims to explain the universal tendencies. Linguistic typology is contrasted with genealogical linguistics on

8658-569: The consonant ḥ in the name suggests an originally exonymic (Arabic) origin. The first appearance of the name in a western printed source is found in Mármol 's Descripcion general de Affrica (1573), which mentions the "indigenous Africans called Xilohes or Berbers" ( los antiguos Affricanos llamados Xilohes o Beréberes ). The initial A- in Aclḥiy is a Shilha nominal prefix (see § Inflected nouns ). The ending -iy (borrowed from

8775-466: The default word-orders are permissible but usually imply a shift in focus, an emphasis on the final element, or some special context. In the poetry of these languages, the word order may also shift freely to meet metrical demands. Additionally, freedom of word order may vary within the same language—for example, formal, literary, or archaizing varieties may have different, stricter, or more lenient constituent-order structures than an informal spoken variety of

8892-503: The description and comparison of languages. The main subfields of linguistic typology include the empirical fields of syntactic, phonological and lexical typology. Additionally, theoretical typology aims to explain the empirical findings, especially statistical tendencies or implicational hierarchies. Syntactic typology studies a vast array of grammatical phenomena from the languages of the world. Two well-known issues include dominant order and left-right symmetry. One set of types reflects

9009-563: The early years of the twenty-first century, however, the existence of linguistic universals became questioned by linguists proposing evolutionary typology. Quantitative typology deals with the distribution and co-occurrence of structural patterns in the languages of the world. Major types of non-chance distribution include: Linguistic universals are patterns that can be seen cross-linguistically. Universals can either be absolute, meaning that every documented language exhibits this characteristic, or statistical, meaning that this characteristic

9126-483: The examples below, w and y are transcribed phonemically in some citation forms, but always phonetically in context, for example ysti- "the daughters of", dars snat istis "he has two daughters". Any consonant in Tashlhiyt, in any position within a word, may be simple or geminate. There may be up to two geminates in a stem, and up to three in a word. The role of gemination varies: Gemination also may occur due to phonological assimilation. For example,

9243-673: The existence of a (logical) general or universal grammar underlying all languages were published in the Middle Ages, especially by the Modistae school. At the time, Latin was the model language of linguistics, although transcribing Irish and Icelandic into the Latin alphabet was found problematic. The cross-linguistic dimension of linguistics was established in the Renaissance period. For example, Grammaticae quadrilinguis partitiones (1544) by Johannes Drosaeus compared French and

9360-409: The fact that semivowels and high vowels can occur in sequence, in lexically determined order, for example tazdwit "bee", tahruyt "ewe" (not * tazduyt , * tahrwit ). In addition, semivowels /w/ and /j/ , like other consonants, occur long, as in afawwu "wrap", tayyu "camel's hump". The assumption of four phonemes also results in a more efficient description of morphology. In

9477-573: The fishing village of Imlili, south of Dakhla (60% of speakers) or the rural municipality of Moulay Ahmed Cherif, 60 km west of the city of Al Hoceima (54% speakers). These situations are reminiscent of the historical migrations that have followed one another over the long term and especially the massive rural exodus that began in the 20th century towards the economic metropolises. Although many speakers of Shilha, especially men, are bilingual in Moroccan Arabic, there are as yet no indications that

9594-407: The following phrase would be realized as [babllfirma]: bab owner n=l-firma of=farm bab n=l-firma owner of=farm Linguistic typology Linguistic typology (or language typology ) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and

9711-446: The grounds that typology groups languages or their grammatical features based on formal similarities rather than historic descendence. The issue of genealogical relation is however relevant to typology because modern data sets aim to be representative and unbiased. Samples are collected evenly from different language families , emphasizing the importance of lesser-known languages in gaining insight into human language. Speculations of

9828-746: The high concentration of Tachelhit-speaking speakers in Dakhla, Tachelhit is spoken significantly by many inhabitants, in Moroccan municipalities outside the area where the language historically originated. With 49% of its speakers living in cities, Tachelhit has become highly urbanized. Thus, 10% of Casablancais speak Tachelhit, i.e. more than 334,000 people. Casablanca is therefore the first Tachelhit city in Morocco, ahead of Agadir (222,000 speakers). Similarly, 9.2% of Rbatis speak Tachelhit, i.e. more than 52,000 people, or 4% of Tangiers and Oujdis. Finally, there are singular cases of very outlying municipalities such as

9945-514: The imposition of the French protectorate (1912). Justinard also wrote several works on the history of the Souss. Emile Laoust (1876–1952), prolific author of books and articles about Berber languages, in 1921 published his Cours de berbère marocain (2nd enlarged edition 1936), a teaching grammar with graded lessons and thematic vocabularies, some good ethnographic texts (without translations) and

10062-504: The language area, the name Tasusiyt (lit. "language of Souss") is now often used as a pars pro toto for the entire language. A speaker of Tasusiyt is an Asusiy , plural Isusiyn , feminine Tasusiyt , plural Tisusiyin . With 4.7 million speakers or 14% of Morocco's population, Tachelhit is the most widely spoken Amazigh language in the Kingdom, ahead of Tamazight and Tarifit. Its speakers represent more than half of

10179-582: The larger towns and cities of northern Morocco and outside Morocco in Belgium , France , Germany , Canada , the United States and Israel . Shilha possesses a distinct and substantial literary tradition that can be traced back several centuries before the protectorate era . Many texts, written in Arabic script and dating from the late 16th century to the present, are preserved in manuscripts. A modern printed literature in Shilha has developed since

10296-456: The mountainous and forested regions of the Middle Atlas mountains to the oases of the northwestern Sahara ( Tafilalt ). Berber in Morocco is spread into three areas: Riff in the north, Central Atlas in the center, and Shilha in the south/southwest. Central Atlas is mutually intelligible with the dialects Riff and Shilha; but Shilha- and Riff-speakers cannot understand each other, although transitional varieties exist between these dialects, creating

10413-482: The neighboring Inoultan, Infedouak and Imeghran ethnic groups counted as CAT. Though Tashelhit has historically been an oral language, manuscripts of mostly religious texts have been written in Tashelhit using the Arabic script since at least the 16th century. Today, Tashelhit is most commonly written in the Arabic script, although Neo-Tifinagh is also used. Shilha has an extensive body of oral literature in

10530-543: The original language was SVO, which supports simpler grammar employing word order instead of case markers to differentiate between clausal roles. Universalist explanations include a model by Russell Tomlin (1986) based on three functional principles: (i) animate before inanimate; (ii) theme before comment; and (iii) verb-object bonding. The three-way model roughly predicts the real hierarchy (see table above) assuming no statistical difference between SOV and SVO, and, also, no statistical difference between VOS and OVS. By contrast,

10647-704: The pharyngeals /ʕ ħ/ . In Ayt Ndhir, which is a dialect of Tamazight with spirantization, the consonants that can be spirantized appear in their stop forms when geminated, and additionally the geminate correspondents of /ʁ, dˤ, ʃ, ʒ, w, j/ are usually /qː, tˤː, t͡ʃː, d͡ʒː, ɣʷː, ɣː/ respectively. However some native Berber words have /ʁː/ (not /qː/ ) where other dialects have singleton /ʁ/ , and similarly for /ʃː, ʒː/ . In addition, in Arabic loans singleton non-spirantized [b, t, tˤ, d, k, ɡ, q] occur (though [b t d] and to an extent [tˤ] often alternate with their spirantized versions in loans), giving this alternation marginal phonemic status. Phonetic notes: Tamazight has

10764-404: The phoneme / p /. Tamazight has a phonemic three-vowel system but also has numerous words without vowels. Central Atlas Tamazight (unlike neighbouring Tashelhit ) had no known significant writing tradition until the 20th century. It is now officially written in the Tifinagh script for instruction in Moroccan schools, while descriptive linguistic literature commonly uses the Latin alphabet , and

10881-407: The place where a transitional vowel may be heard, irrespective of its quality, and they also write ⟨e⟩ where in reality no vowel, however short, is heard, for example ⟨akessab⟩ /akssab/ "owner of livestock", ⟨ar icetta⟩ /ar iʃtta/ "he's eating". The symbol ⟨e⟩ , often referred to as " schwa ", as used by Aspinion and others, thus becomes

10998-439: The prefix /a-/, and singular feminines the circumfix /t...t . Plurals may either involve a regular change ("sound plurals"), internal vowel change ("broken plurals"), or a combination of the two. Masculine plurals usually take the prefix /i-/ , feminines /ti-/ , and sound plurals also take the suffix /-n/ in the masculine and /-in/ } in the feminine, but many other plural patterns are found. Examples: Nouns may be put into

11115-458: The processing efficiency theory of John A. Hawkins (1994) suggests that constituents are ordered from shortest to longest in VO languages, and from longest to shortest in OV languages, giving rise to the attested distribution. This approach relies on the notion that OV languages have heavy subjects, and VO languages have heavy objects, which is disputed. A second major way of syntactic categorization

11232-460: The promotion of Tamazight and other Berber languages and cultures, the government created the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture (IRCAM) in 2001. Central Atlas Tamazight is mostly spoken in the entire Middle Atlas and its outcroppings, reaching east to Taza and west to the region near Rabat . It is also spoken in the central and eastern High Atlas mountains in Morocco. It is thus spoken across areas with widely varying ecological conditions — from

11349-482: The relevance of geographical distribution of different values for various features of linguistic structure. They may have wanted to discover whether a particular grammatical structure found in one language is likewise found in another language in the same geographic location. Some languages split verbs into an auxiliary and an infinitive or participle and put the subject and/or object between them. For instance, German ( Ich habe einen Fuchs im Wald gesehen - *"I have

11466-492: The rest ("stative verbs") join the subject in the same case as the patient . Yet other languages behave ergatively only in some contexts (this " split ergativity " is often based on the grammatical person of the arguments or on the tense/aspect of the verb). For example, only some verbs in Georgian behave this way, and, as a rule, only while using the perfective (aorist). Linguistic typology also seeks to identify patterns in

11583-426: The rest of Central Atlas Tamazight belongs, and are therefore excluded by some sources from Central Atlas Tamazight. The Ethnologue lists another group of Zenati dialects, South Oran Berber ( ksours sud-oranais ), as a dialect of Central Atlas Tamazight, but these are even less similar, and are treated by Berber specialists as a separate dialect group. The Berbers have lived in North Africa between western Egypt and

11700-451: The same language. On the other hand, when there is no clear preference under the described conditions, the language is considered to have "flexible constituent order" (a type unto itself). An additional problem is that in languages without living speech communities, such as Latin , Ancient Greek , and Old Church Slavonic , linguists have only written evidence, perhaps written in a poetic, formalizing, or archaic style that mischaracterizes

11817-409: The semivowels are thus in complementary distribution with the high vowels, with the semivowels occurring as onset or coda, and the high vowels as nucleus in a syllable. This surface distribution of the semivowels and the high vowels has tended to obscure their status as four distinct phonemes, with some linguists denying phonemic status to /w/ and /j/. Positing four distinct phonemes is necessitated by

11934-624: The southwest, from the Achtouken in the west to the Iznagen in the east, and from Aqqa in the desert to Tassaout in the plain of Marrakesh." There exists no sharply defined boundary between Shilha dialects and the dialects of Central Atlas Tamazight (CAT). The dividing line is generally put somewhere along the line Marrakesh-Zagora, with the speech of the Ighoujdamen, Iglioua and Aït Ouaouzguite ethnic groups belonging to Shilha, and that of

12051-485: The structure and distribution of sound systems among the world's languages. This is accomplished by surveying and analyzing the relative frequencies of different phonological properties. Exemplary relative frequencies are given below for certain speech sounds formed by obstructing airflow (obstruents) . These relative frequencies show that contrastive voicing commonly occurs with plosives , as in English neat and need , but occurs much more rarely among fricatives , such as

12168-647: The subject position, a possessive suffix (and a derived independent possessive pronoun ), and an object form affixed to the controlling verb. Demonstrative pronouns distinguish between proximate and remote. When they occur independently, they inflect for number. They may also be suffixed to nouns: /tabardaja/ 'this pack-saddle'. Shilha language Shilha ( / ˈ ʃ ɪ l h ə / SHIL -hə ; from its name in Moroccan Arabic , Šəlḥa ), now more commonly known as Tashelhiyt , Tachelhit ( / ˈ t æ ʃ ə l h ɪ t / TASH -əl-hit ; from

12285-521: The survival of Shilha as a living language will be seriously threatened in the immediate future. Because of the rapid growth of the Moroccan population over the past decades (from 12 million in 1961 to over 33 million in 2014), it is safe to say that Shilha is now spoken by more people than ever before in history. Dialect differentiation within Shilha, such as it is, has not been the subject of any targeted research, but several scholars have noted that all varieties of Shilha are mutually intelligible. The first

12402-508: The teachers do not speak Berber, and require them to learn both Arabic and French. Rural Morocco, including the Central Atlas area, suffers from poverty. Tamazight along with its relative Shilha are undergoing "contraction" as rural families, motivated by economic necessity, move to cities and stop speaking Tamazight, leading many intellectuals to fear Berber language shift or regression. However, Tamazight speakers are reported to immigrate less than many other Berber groups. Moreover, Tamazight has

12519-590: The three ‘holy languages’, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The approach was expanded by the Port-Royal Grammar (1660) of Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot , who added Spanish, Italian, German and Arabic. Nicolas Beauzée 's 1767 book includes examples of English, Swedish, Lappish , Irish, Welsh , Basque , Quechua , and Chinese. The conquest and conversion of the world by Europeans gave rise to 'missionary linguistics' producing first-hand word lists and grammatical descriptions of exotic languages. Such work

12636-539: The towns of Guelmim , Taroudant , Oulad Teima , Tiznit and Ouarzazate . In the north and to the south, Shilha borders Arabic -speaking areas. In the northeast, roughly along the line Demnate - Zagora , there is a dialect continuum with Central Atlas Tamazight . Within the Shilha-speaking area, there are several Arabic-speaking enclaves, notably the town of Taroudant and its surroundings. Substantial Shilha-speaking migrant communities are found in most of

12753-445: The typically (High Atlas, Souss-Basin rural country, Jbel Atlas Saghro) auxiliary verb /g/ (e.g. /iga argaz/ "it's a man"). The differences between each of the three groups are primarily phonological. Groups speaking Tamazight include: Ait Ayache, Ait Morghi, Ait Alaham, Ait Youb, Marmoucha, Ait Youssi, Beni Mguild, Zayane , Zemmour, Ait Rbaa, Ait Seri, Guerouane, Ait Segougou, Ait Yafelman , Ait Sikhmane, Ayt Ndhir (Beni Mtir). There

12870-420: The upper hand relatively recently, as they are attested only in those manuscript texts which date from the 19th and 20th centuries. In older texts, the language is still referred to as Tamaziɣt or Tamazixt "Tamazight". For example, the author Awzal (early 18th c.) speaks of nnaḍm n Tmazixt ann ifulkin "a composition in that beautiful Tamazight". Because Souss is the most heavily populated part of

12987-435: The village while the men go to work in the cities. Since Tamazight is the language of the home, girls grow up speaking Berber languages and pass them on to their children — this gender stratification helps to preserve the language. Bilingual Berber speakers have learned Moroccan Arabic via schooling, migration, media, or through the government. Most rural Berber children are monolingual. They struggle to succeed in schools where

13104-465: The vowel, as in kraḍ [krɐdˤ] "three", kkuẓ [kkɤzˤ] "four", sḍis [sdˤɪs] "six" (compare yan [jæn] "one", sin [sin] "two", smmus [smmʊs] "five"). Additional phonemic vowels occur sporadically in recent loanwords, for example /o/ as in rristora "restaurant" (from French). In addition to the three phonemic vowels, there are non-phonemic transitional vowels, often collectively referred to as " schwa ". Typically,

13221-661: The vowels in a strictly phonemic manner, as in Galand (1988) and all recent text editions. The chart below represents Tashlhiyt consonants in IPA, with orthographical representations added between angled brackets when different: Additional phonemic consonants occur sporadically in recent loanwords, for example /bʷ/ as in bb°a "(my) father" (from Moroccan Arabic), and /p/ as in laplaj "beach" (from French). Like other Berber languages and Arabic, Tashlhiyt has both pharyngealized ("emphatic") and plain dental consonants. There

13338-399: The work is written in a dense, inaccessible style, without a single clearly presented paradigm. Transcriptions, apart from being unconventional, are unreliable throughout. The only available accessible grammatical sketch written in a modern linguistic frame is " Le Berbère " (1988) by Lionel Galand (1920–2017), a French linguist and berberologist. The sketch is mainly based on the speech of

13455-526: Was Stumme, who observed that all speakers can understand each other, "because the individual dialects of their language are not very different." This was later confirmed by Ahmed Boukous, a Moroccan linguist and himself a native speaker of Shilha, who stated: "Shilha is endowed with a profound unity which permits the Shluh to communicate without problem, from the Ihahan in the northwest to the Aït Baamran in

13572-464: Was in a condition of siba , recognising the spiritual legitimacy of royal authority but rejecting its political claims. The expansion of the Ait Atta starting from the 16th century brought Tamazight back into the already Arabised Tafilalt region and put other regional tribes on the defensive, leading to the formation of the Ait Yafelman alliance. The 1912 Treaty of Fez made most of Morocco

13689-419: Was later developed by others including August Schleicher , Heymann Steinthal , Franz Misteli, Franz Nicolaus Finck , and Max Müller . The word 'typology' was proposed by Georg von der Gabelentz in his Sprachwissenschaft (1891). Louis Hjelmslev proposed typology as a large-scale empirical-analytical endeavour of comparing grammatical features to uncover the essence of language. Such a project began from

#892107