Northern Berber
143-591: Kabyle Atlas Zenati Western Berber Eastern Berber Tuareg The Berber languages , also known as the Amazigh languages or Tamazight , are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family . They comprise a group of closely related but mostly mutually unintelligible languages spoken by Berber communities, who are indigenous to North Africa . The languages are primarily spoken and not typically written. Historically, they have been written with
286-700: A pejorative way. For example, Romani people often prefer that term to exonyms such as Gypsy (from the name of Egypt ), and the French term bohémien , bohème (from the name of Bohemia ). People may also avoid exonyms for reasons of historical sensitivity, as in the case of German names for Polish and Czech places that, at one time, had been ethnically or politically German (e.g. Danzig/ Gdańsk , Auschwitz/ Oświęcim and Karlsbad/ Karlovy Vary ); and Russian names for non-Russian locations that were subsequently renamed or had their spelling changed (e.g. Kiev/ Kyiv ). In recent years, geographers have sought to reduce
429-492: A pitch accent . At present, there is no generally accepted reconstruction of Proto-Afroasiatic grammar, syntax, or morphology, nor one for any of the sub-branches besides Egyptian. This means that it is difficult to know which features in Afroasiatic languages are retentions, and which are innovations. Moreover, all Afroasiatic languages have long been in contact with other language families and with each other, leading to
572-509: A Cushitic-Omotic group. Additionally, the minority of scholars who favor an Asian origin of Afroasiatic tend to place Semitic as the first branch to split off. Disagreement on which features are innovative and which are inherited from Proto-Afroasiatic produces radically different trees, as can be seen by comparing the trees produced by Ehret and Igor Diakonoff . Responding to the above, Tom Güldemann criticizes attempts at finding subgroupings based on common or lacking morphology by arguing that
715-455: A branch of Afroasiatic persisted as late as the 1980s. In 1969, Harold Fleming proposed that a group of languages classified by Greenberg as Cushitic were in fact their own independent "Omotic" branch—a proposal that has been widely, if not universally, accepted. These six branches now constitute an academic consensus on the genetic structure of the family. Greenberg relied on his own method of mass comparison of vocabulary items rather than
858-677: A different writing system. For instance, Deutschland is the endonym for the country that is also known by the exonyms Germany and Germania in English and Italian , respectively, Alemania and Allemagne in Spanish and French , respectively, Niemcy in Polish , Saksa and Saksamaa in Finnish and Estonian . The terms autonym , endonym , exonym and xenonym are formed by adding specific prefixes to
1001-467: A duality of Semitic and "Hamitic" any more than Indo-European implies a duality of Indic and "European". Because of its use by several important scholars and in the titles of significant works of scholarship, the total replacement of Hamito-Semitic is difficult. While Greenberg ultimately popularized the name "Afroasiatic" in 1960, it appears to have been coined originally by Maurice Delafosse , as French afroasiatique , in 1914. The name refers to
1144-574: A few exceptions, form a dialect continuum . There is a debate as to how to best sub-categorize languages within the Berber branch. Berber languages typically follow verb–subject–object word order . Their phonological inventories are diverse. Millions of people in Morocco and Algeria natively speak a Berber language, as do smaller populations of Libya , Tunisia , northern Mali , western and northern Niger , northern Burkina Faso and Mauritania and
1287-422: A majority of scholars: There is no agreement on the relationships between and subgrouping of the different Afroasiatic branches. Whereas Marcel Cohen (1947) claimed he saw no evidence for internal subgroupings, numerous other scholars have made proposals, with Carsten Peust counting 27 as of 2012. Common trends in proposals as of 2019 include using common or lacking grammatical features to argue that Omotic
1430-559: A neutral name may be preferred so as to not offend anyone. Thus, an exonym such as Brussels in English could be used instead of favoring either one of the local names ( Dutch / Flemish : Brussel ; French : Bruxelles ). Other difficulties with endonyms have to do with pronunciation, spelling, and word category . The endonym may include sounds and spellings that are highly unfamiliar to speakers of other languages, making appropriate usage difficult if not impossible for an outsider. Over
1573-406: A noun or a verb, there is evidence for the existence of distinct noun and verb roots, which behave in different ways. As part of these templates, the alternation ( apophony ) between high vowels (e.g. i, u) and a low vowel (a) in verbal forms is usually described as one of the main characteristics of AA languages: this change codes a variety of different functions. It is unclear whether this system
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#17327653240151716-610: A number of key loanwords related to pastoralism that are of Berber origin, including the terms for sheep and water/ Nile . This in turn suggests that the C-Group population—which, along with the Kerma culture , inhabited the Nile valley immediately before the arrival of the first Nubian speakers—spoke Afroasiatic languages. Berber languages are primarily oral languages without a major written component. Historically, they were written with
1859-585: A particular group or linguistic community to identify or designate themselves, their place of origin, or their language. An exonym (also known as xenonym ) is an established, non-native name for a group of people, individual person, geographical place, language, or dialect, meaning that it is used primarily outside the particular place inhabited by the group or linguistic community. Exonyms exist not only for historico-geographical reasons but also in consideration of difficulties when pronouncing foreign words, or from non-systematic attempts at transcribing into
2002-541: A policy of Arabisation, which, after the imposition of the Circular of July 1976, encompassed the spheres of education, public administration, public signage, print publication, and the judiciary. While primarily directed towards the erasure of French in Algerian society, these policies also targeted Berber languages, leading to dissatisfaction and unrest amongst speakers of Berber languages, who made up about one quarter of
2145-662: A prospective new constitution, it does not have official status in Libya as in Morocco and Algeria. As areas of Libya south and west of Tripoli such as the Nafusa Mountains were taken from the control of Gaddafi government forces in early summer 2011, Berber workshops and exhibitions sprang up to share and spread the Berber culture and language. In Mali and Niger, some Tuareg languages have been recognized as national languages and have been part of school curriculums since
2288-512: A single language family, and in 1876 Friedrich Müller first described them as a "Hamito-Semitic" language family. Müller assumed that there existed a distinct "Hamitic" branch of the family that consisted of Egyptian, Berber, and Cushitic. He did not include the Chadic languages, though contemporary Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius argued for the relation of Hausa to the Berber languages. Some scholars would continue to regard Hausa as related to
2431-595: A single language with multiple dialects. Other scholars, however, argue that they are a group of around twelve languages, about as different from each other as the Romance or Germanic languages. In the past, Berber languages were spoken throughout North Africa except in Egypt; since the 7th century CE, however, they have been heavily affected by Arabic and have been replaced by it in many places. There are two extinct languages potentially related to modern Berber. The first
2574-405: A spread of migrating farmers into Africa, but rather a gradual incorporation of animal husbandry into indigenous foraging cultures. Ehret, in a separate publication, argued that the two principles in linguistic approaches for determining the origin of languages which are the principles of fewest moves and greatest diversity had put “beyond reasonable doubt” that the language family “had originated in
2717-497: A syllable to begin with a vowel; however, in many Chadic languages verbs must begin with a consonant. In Cushitic and Chadic languages, a glottal stop or glottal fricative may be inserted to prevent a word from beginning with a vowel. Typically, syllables begin with only a single consonant. Diakonoff argues that proto-Afroasiatic did not have consonant clusters within a syllable. With the exception of some Chadic languages, all Afroasiatic languages allow both open syllables (ending in
2860-525: A vowel) and closed syllables (ending in a consonant); many Chadic languages do not allow a syllable to end in a consonant. Most words end in a vowel in Omotic and Cushitic, making syllable-final consonant clusters rare. Syllable weight plays an important role in AA, especially in Chadic; it can affect the form of affixes attached to a word. Several Afroasiatic languages have large consonant inventories, and it
3003-510: Is Afroasiatic at all, due its lack of several typical aspects of Afroasiatic morphology. There are between 40 and 80 languages in the Semitic family. Today, Semitic languages are spoken across North Africa, West Asia, and the Horn of Africa, as well as on the island of Malta, making them the sole Afroasiatic branch with members originating outside Africa. Arabic, spoken in both Asia and Africa,
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#17327653240153146-406: Is a common AA trait; the Chadic examples, for instance, show signs of originally deriving from affixes, which could explain the origins of the alterations in other languages as well. Endonym and exonym An endonym (also known as autonym ) is a common, native name for a group of people, individual person, geographical place , language , or dialect , meaning that it is used inside
3289-481: Is a consonantal structure into which various vocalic "templates" are placed. This structure is particularly visible in the verbs, and is particularly noticeable in Semitic. Besides for Semitic, vocalic templates are well attested for Cushitic and Berber, where, along with Chadic, it is less productive; it is absent in Omotic. For Egyptian, evidence for the root-and-template structure exists from Coptic. In Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, verbs have no inherent vowels at all;
3432-405: Is a large variety of vocalic systems in AA, and attempts to reconstruct the vocalic system of Proto-Afroasiatic vary considerably. All branches of Afroasiatic have a limited number of underlying vowels (between two and seven), but the number of phonetic vowels can be much larger. The quality of the underlying vowels varies considerably by language; the most common vowel throughout AA is schwa . In
3575-486: Is against two different labial consonants (other than w ) occurring together in a root, a constraint which can be found in all branches but Omotic. Another widespread constraint is against two non-identical lateral obstruents , which can be found in Egyptian, Chadic, Semitic, and probably Cushitic. Such rules do not always apply for nouns, numerals, or denominal verbs , and do not affect prefixes or suffixes added to
3718-501: Is attested in Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, and Semitic: it usually affects features such as pharyngealization, palatalization , and labialization . Several Omotic languages have " sibilant harmony", meaning that all sibilants (s, sh, z, ts, etc.) in a word must match. Restrictions against the co-occurrence of certain, usually similar, consonants in verbal roots can be found in all Afroasiatic branches, though they are only weakly attested in Chadic and Omotic. The most widespread constraint
3861-485: Is by far the most widely spoken Afroasiatic language today, with around 300 million native speakers, while the Ethiopian Amharic language has around 25 million; collectively, Semitic is the largest branch of Afroasiatic by number of current speakers. Most authorities divide Semitic into two branches: East Semitic, which includes the extinct Akkadian language, and West Semitic, which includes Arabic, Aramaic,
4004-428: Is first attested in writing around 3000 BCE and finally went extinct around 1300 CE, making it the language with the longest written history in the world. Egyptian is usually divided into two major periods, Earlier Egyptian (c. 3000–1300 BCE), which is further subdivided into Old Egyptian and Middle Egyptian, and Later Egyptian (1300 BCE-1300 CE), which is further subdivided into Late Egyptian, Demotic, and Coptic. Coptic
4147-419: Is hindered by the massive disparities in textual attestation between its branches: while the Semitic and Egyptian branches are attested in writing as early as the fourth millennium BC , Berber, Cushitic, and Omotic languages were often not recorded until the 19th or 20th centuries. While systematic sound laws have not yet been established to explain the relationships between the various branches of Afroasiatic,
4290-628: Is included, spoken around the Horn of Africa and in Sudan and Tanzania. The Cushitic family is traditionally split into four branches: the single language of Beja (c. 3 million speakers), the Agaw languages, Eastern Cushitic, and Southern Cushitic. Only one Cushitic language, Oromo , has more than 25 million speakers; other languages with more than a million speakers include Somali , Afar , Hadiyya , and Sidaama . Many Cushitic languages have relatively few speakers. Cushitic does not appear to be related to
4433-523: Is likely that this is inherited from proto-Afroasiatic. All Afroasiatic languages contain stops and fricatives ; some branches have additional types of consonants such as affricates and lateral consonants . AA languages tend to have pharyngeal fricative consonants, with Egyptian, Semitic, Berber, and Cushitic sharing ħ and ʕ . In all AA languages, consonants can be bilabial , alveolar , velar , and glottal , with additional places of articulation found in some branches or languages. Additionally,
Berber languages - Misplaced Pages Continue
4576-1429: Is listed as negligible, and the last Sokna speaker is thought to have died in the 1950s. There are an estimated 50,000 Djerbi speakers in Tunisia , based on figures from 2004. Sened is likely extinct, with the last speaker having died in the 1970s. Ghadamés, though not indigenous to Tunisia, is estimated to have 3,100 speakers throughout the country. Chenini is one of the rare remaining Berber-speaking villages in Tunisia. There are an estimated 20,000 Siwi speakers in Egypt , based on figures from 2013. As of 2018 and 2017 respectively, there were an estimated 200 speakers of Zenaga and 117,000 of Tamasheq in Mauritania . As of 2009, there were an estimated 122,000 Tamasheq speakers in Burkina Faso. There are an estimated 1.5 million speakers of various Berber languages in France. A small number of Tawellemmet speakers live in Nigeria. In total, there are an estimated 3.6 million speakers of Berber languages in countries outside of Morocco and Algeria, summarized as follows: After independence, all
4719-468: Is most commonly used. The changes to Hanyu Pinyin were not only financially costly but were unpopular with the locals, who opined that the Hanyu Pinyin versions were too difficult for non-Chinese or non-Mandarin speakers to pronounce. The government eventually stopped the changes by the 1990s, which has led to some place names within a locality having differing spellings. For example, Nee Soon Road and
4862-541: Is mostly used in older Russian sources. The elements of the name were derived from the names of two sons of Noah as attested in the Book of Genesis 's Table of Nations passage: "Semitic" from the first-born Shem , and "Hamitic" from the second-born Ham (Genesis 5:32). Within the Table of Nations, each of Noah's sons is presented as the common progenitor of various people groups deemed to be closely related: among others Shem
5005-481: Is no information on whether Egyptian had tones. In contemporary Omotic, Chadic, and Cushitic languages, tone is primarily a grammatical feature: it encodes various grammatical functions, only differentiating lexical roots in a few cases. In some Chadic and some Omotic languages every syllable has to have a tone, whereas in most Cushitic languages this is not the case. Some scholars postulate that Proto-Afroasiatic may have had tone, while others believe it arose later from
5148-718: Is not its Dutch exonym. Old place names that have become outdated after renaming may afterward still be used as historicisms . For example, even today one would talk about the Siege of Leningrad , not the Siege of St. Petersburg because at that time (1941–1944) the city was called Leningrad. Likewise, one would say that Immanuel Kant was born in Königsberg in 1724, not in Kaliningrad ( Калининград ), as it has been called since 1946. Likewise, Istanbul (Turkish: İstanbul )
5291-436: Is not the academic consensus. M. Victoria Almansa-Villatoro and Silvia Štubňová Nigrelli write that there are about 400 languages in Afroasiatic; Ethnologue lists 375 languages. Many scholars estimate fewer languages; exact numbers vary depending on the definitions of " language " and " dialect ". The Berber (or Libyco-Berber) languages are spoken today by perhaps 16 million people. They are often considered to constitute
5434-563: Is now spelled Xinyi . However, districts like Tamsui and even Taipei itself are not spelled according to Hanyu Pinyin spelling rules. As a matter of fact, most names of Taiwanese cities are still spelled using Chinese postal romanization , including Taipei , Taichung , Taitung , Keelung , and Kaohsiung . During the 1980s, the Singapore Government encouraged the use of Hanyu Pinyin spelling for place names, especially those with Teochew, Hokkien or Cantonese names, as part of
5577-414: Is often included as an Eastern Berber language alongside Siwa, Sokna, and El Foqaha. These approaches divide the Berber languages into Northern, Southern (Tuareg), Eastern, and Western varieties. The vast majority of speakers of Berber languages are concentrated in Morocco and Algeria. The exact population of speakers has been historically difficult to ascertain due to lack of official recognition. Morocco
5720-542: Is sometimes used to refer to a specific subset of Berber languages, such as Central Tashlhiyt. "Tamazight" can also be used to refer to Standard Moroccan Tamazight or Standard Algerian Tamazight , as in the Moroccan and Algerian constitutions respectively. In Morocco, besides referring to all Berber languages or to Standard Moroccan Tamazight, "Tamazight" is often used in contrast to Tashelhit and Tarifit to refer to Central Atlas Tamazight . The use of Berber has been
5863-549: Is still called Constantinople ( Κωνσταντινούπολη ) in Greek, although the name was changed in Turkish to dissociate the city from its Greek past between 1923 and 1930 (the name Istanbul itself derives from a Medieval Greek phrase ). Prior to Constantinople , the city was known in Greek as Byzantion ( Greek : Βυζάντιον , Latin : Byzantium ), named after its mythical founder, Byzas . Following independence from
Berber languages - Misplaced Pages Continue
6006-472: Is that the Hamitic component inaccurately suggests that a monophyletic "Hamitic" branch exists alongside Semitic. In addition, Joseph Greenberg has argued that Hamitic possesses racial connotations , and that "Hamito-Semitic" overstates the centrality of the Semitic languages within the family. By contrast, Victor Porkhomovsky suggests that the label is simply an inherited convention, and doesn't imply
6149-718: Is the Numidian language , represented by over a thousand short inscriptions in the Libyco-Berber alphabet , found throughout North Africa and dating from the 2nd century BCE onward. The second is the Guanche language , which was formerly spoken on the Canary Islands and went extinct in the 17th century CE. The first longer written examples of modern Berber varieties only date from the 16th or 17th centuries CE. Chadic languages number between 150 and 190, making Chadic
6292-595: Is the country with the greatest number of speakers of Berber languages. As of 2022, Ethnologue estimates there to be 13.8 million speakers of Berber languages in Morocco, based on figures from 2016 and 2017. In 1960, the first census after Moroccan independence was held. It claimed that 32 percent of Moroccans spoke a Berber language, including bi-, tri- and quadrilingual people. The 2004 census found that 3,894,805 Moroccans over five years of age spoke Tashelhit, 2,343,937 spoke Central Atlas Tamazight, and 1,270,986 spoke Tarifit, representing 14.6%, 8.8%, and 4.8% respectively of
6435-572: Is the human tendency towards neighbours to "be pejorative rather than complimentary, especially where there is a real or fancied difference in cultural level between the ingroup and the outgroup ." For example, Matisoff notes, Khang "an opprobrious term indicating mixed race or parentage" is the Palaung name for Jingpo people and the Jingpo name for Chin people ; both the Jingpo and Burmese use
6578-502: Is the lack of agreement on the subgroupings of Afroasiatic (see Further subdivisions ) – this makes associating archaeological evidence with the spread of Afroasiatic particularly difficult. Nevertheless, there is a long-accepted link between the speakers of Proto- Southern Cushitic languages and the East African Savanna Pastoral Neolithic (5,000 years ago), and archaeological evidence associates
6721-515: Is the only stage written alphabetically to show vowels, whereas Egyptian was previously written in Egyptian hieroglyphs , which only represent consonants. In the Coptic period, there is evidence for six major dialects, which presumably existed previously but are obscured by pre-Coptic writing; additionally, Middle Egyptian appears to be based on a different dialect than Old Egyptian, which in turn shows dialectal similarities to Late Egyptian. Egyptian
6864-461: Is to use a computational methodology such as lexicostatistics , with one of the earliest attempts being Fleming 1983. This is also the method used by Alexander Militarev and Sergei Starostin to create a family tree. Fleming (2006) was a more recent attempt by Fleming, with a different result from Militarev and Starostin. Hezekiah Bacovcin and David Wilson argue that this methodology is invalid for discerning linguistic sub-relationship. They note
7007-609: The African continent , including all those not belonging to the Semitic branch. Arabic , if counted as a single language, is by far the most widely spoken within the family, with around 300 million native speakers concentrated primarily in the Middle East and North Africa. Other major Afroasiatic languages include the Cushitic Oromo language with 45 million native speakers, Chadic Hausa language with over 34 million,
7150-656: The Beijing dialect , became the official romanization method for Mandarin in the 1970s. As the Mandarin pronunciation does not perfectly map to an English phoneme , English speakers using either romanization will not pronounce the names correctly if standard English pronunciation is used. Nonetheless, many older English speakers still refer to the cities by their older English names, and even today they are often used in their traditional associations, such as Peking duck , Peking opera , and Peking University . As for Nanjing,
7293-606: The Greek root word ónoma ( ὄνομα , 'name'), from Proto-Indo-European *h₃nómn̥ . The prefixes added to these terms are also derived from Greek: The terms autonym and xenonym also have different applications, thus leaving endonym and exonym as the preferred forms. Marcel Aurousseau , an Australian geographer , first used the term exonym in his work The Rendering of Geographical Names (1957). Endonyms and exonyms can be divided in three main categories: As it pertains to geographical features ,
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#17327653240157436-536: The Horn of Africa , and parts of the Sahara and Sahel . Over 500 million people are native speakers of an Afroasiatic language, constituting the fourth-largest language family after Indo-European , Sino-Tibetan , and Niger–Congo . Most linguists divide the family into six branches: Berber , Chadic , Cushitic , Egyptian , Semitic , and Omotic . The vast majority of Afroasiatic languages are considered indigenous to
7579-718: The Kabyles use the term "Leqbayel" to refer to their own people, while the Chaouis identified themselves as "Ishawiyen" instead of Berber/Amazigh. Since modern Berber languages are relatively homogeneous, the date of the Proto-Berber language from which the modern group is derived was probably comparatively recent, comparable to the age of the Germanic or Romance subfamilies of the Indo-European family. In contrast,
7722-579: The Libyco-Berber script . Early uses of the script have been found on rock art and in various sepulchres; the oldest known variations of the script dates to inscriptions in Dugga from 600 BC. Usage of this script, in the form of Tifinagh , has continued into the present day among the Tuareg people . Following the spread of Islam , some Berber scholars also utilized the Arabic script . The Berber Latin alphabet
7865-470: The Maghreb countries to varying degrees pursued a policy of Arabisation , aimed partly at displacing French from its colonial position as the dominant language of education and literacy. Under this policy the use of the Berber languages was suppressed or even banned. This state of affairs has been contested by Berbers in Morocco and Algeria—especially Kabylie —and was addressed in both countries by affording
8008-721: The Nilotic languages ; it is unclear whether the Dizoid group of Omotic languages belongs to the Northern or Southern group. The two Omotic languages with the most speakers are Wolaitta and Gamo-Gofa-Dawro , with about 1.2 million speakers each. A majority of specialists consider Omotic to constitute a sixth branch of Afroasiatic. Omotic was formerly considered part of the Cushitic branch; some scholars continue to consider it part of Cushitic. Other scholars have questioned whether it
8151-518: The Omotic languages to constitute a sixth branch. Due to the presumed distance of relationship between the various branches, many scholars prefer to refer to Afroasiatic as a "linguistic phylum" rather than a "language family". G.W. Tsereteli goes even further and outright doubts that the Afro-Asiatic languages are a genetic language family altogether, but are rather a sprachbund. However, this
8294-638: The Proto-Cushitic speakers with economic transformations in the Sahara dating c. 8,500 ago, as well as the speakers of the Proto-Zenati variety of the Berber languages with an expansion across the Maghreb in the 5th century CE. An origin somewhere on the African continent has broad scholarly support, and is seen as being well-supported by the linguistic data. Most scholars more narrowly place
8437-526: The Roman Empire applied the word " Walha " to foreigners they encountered and this evolved in West Germanic languages as a generic name for speakers of Celtic and later (as Celts became increasingly romanised) Romance languages; thence: During the late 20th century, the use of exonyms often became controversial. Groups often prefer that outsiders avoid exonyms where they have come to be used in
8580-585: The Semitic languages had already been coined in 1781 by August Ludwig von Schlözer , following an earlier suggestion by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1710. Hamitic was first used by Ernest Renan in 1855 to refer to languages that appeared similar to the Semitic languages, but were not themselves provably a part of the family. The belief in a connection between Africans and the Biblical Ham, which had existed at least as far back as Isidore of Seville in
8723-557: The Singapore Armed Forces base Nee Soon Camp are both located in Yishun but retained the old spelling. Matisoff wrote, "A group's autonym is often egocentric, equating the name of the people with 'mankind in general,' or the name of the language with 'human speech'." In Basque , the term erdara/erdera is used for speakers of any language other than Basque (usually Spanish or French). Many millennia earlier,
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#17327653240158866-569: The Siwa Oasis of Egypt . There are also probably a few million speakers of Berber languages in Western Europe . Tashlhiyt , Kabyle , Central Atlas Tamazight , Tarifit , and Shawiya are some of the most commonly spoken Berber languages. Exact numbers are impossible to ascertain as there are few modern North African censuses that include questions on language use, and what censuses do exist have known flaws. Following independence in
9009-514: The Slavs are describing Germanic people as "mutes"—in contrast to themselves, "the speaking ones". The most common names of several Indigenous American tribes derive from pejorative exonyms. The name " Apache " most likely derives from a Zuni word meaning "enemy". The name " Sioux ", an abbreviated form of Nadouessioux , most likely derived from a Proto-Algonquian term, * -a·towe· ('foreign-speaking). The name " Comanche " comes from
9152-547: The Speak Mandarin Campaign to promote Mandarin and discourage the use of dialects. For example, the area of Nee Soon, named after Teochew -Peranakan businessman Lim Nee Soon (Hanyu Pinyin: Lín Yìshùn) became Yishun and the neighbourhood schools and places established following the change used the Hanyu Pinyin spelling. In contrast, Hougang is the Hanyu Pinyin spelling but the Hokkien pronunciation au-kang
9295-541: The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names defines: For example, India , China , Egypt , and Germany are the English-language exonyms corresponding to the endonyms Bhārat ( भारत ), Zhōngguó ( 中国 ), Masr ( مَصر ), and Deutschland , respectively. There are also typonyms of specific features, for example hydronyms for bodies of water. In
9438-511: The Ute word kɨmantsi meaning "enemy, stranger". The Ancestral Puebloans are also known as the "Anasazi", a Navajo word meaning "ancient enemies", and contemporary Puebloans discourage the use of the exonym. Various Native-American autonyms are sometimes explained to English readers as having literal translations of "original people" or "normal people", with implicit contrast to other first nations as not original or not normal. Although
9581-410: The comparative method of demonstrating regular sound correspondences to establish the family. An alternative classification, based on the pronominal and conjugation systems, was proposed by A.N. Tucker in 1967. As of 2023, widely accepted sound correspondences between the different branches have not yet been firmly established. Nevertheless, morphological traits attributable to the proto-language and
9724-500: The glottal stop ( ʔ ) usually exists as a phoneme, and there tends to be no phonemic contrast between [p] and [f] or [b] and [v]. In Cushitic, the Ethiopian Semitic language Tigrinya , and some Chadic languages, there is no underlying phoneme [p] at all. Most, if not all branches of Afroasiatic distinguish between voiceless , voiced , and " emphatic " consonants. The emphatic consonants are typically formed deeper in
9867-404: The "Hamites", the originators of Hamitic languages, with (supposedly culturally superior) "Caucasians", who were assumed to have migrated into Africa and intermixed with indigenous "Negroid" Africans in ancient times. The "Hamitic theory" would serve as the basis for Carl Meinhof 's highly influential classification of African languages in his 1912 book Die Sprache der Hamiten . On one hand,
10010-603: The "Hamitic" classification was justified partially based on linguistic features: for example, Meinhof split the presently-understood Chadic family into "Hamito-Chadic", and an unrelated non-Hamitic "Chadic" based on which languages possessed grammatical gender. On the other hand, the classification also relied on non-linguistic anthropological and culturally contingent features, such as skin color, hair type, and lifestyle. Ultimately, Meinhof's classification of Hamitic proved to include languages from every presently-recognized language family within Africa. The first scholar to question
10153-508: The "language". The term survives to this day in the Slavic languages (e.g. Ukrainian німці (nimtsi); Russian немцы (nemtsy), Slovene Nemčija), and was borrowed into Hungarian , Romanian , and Ottoman Turkish (in which case it referred specifically to Austria ). One of the more prominent theories regarding the origin of the term " Slav " suggests that it comes from the Slavic root slovo (hence " Slovakia " and " Slovenia " for example), meaning 'word' or 'speech'. In this context,
10296-570: The 1960s. In linguistics, the phonology of Berber languages is written with the International Phonetic Alphabet , with the following exceptions: Afroasiatic language family The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic , sometimes Afrasian ), also known as Hamito-Semitic or Semito-Hamitic , are a language family (or "phylum") of about 400 languages spoken predominantly in West Asia , North Africa ,
10439-554: The 20th century, the Berber languages have been suppressed and suffered from low prestige in North Africa . Recognition of the Berber languages has been growing in the 21st century, with Morocco and Algeria adding Tamazight as an official language to their constitutions in 2011 and 2016 respectively. Most Berber languages have a high percentage of borrowing and influence from the Arabic language , as well as from other languages. For example, Arabic loanwords represent 35% to 46% of
10582-452: The 6th century AD, led scholars in the early 19th century to speak vaguely of "Hamian" or "Hamitish" languages. The term Hamito-Semitic has largely fallen out of favor among linguists writing in English, but is still frequently used in the scholarship of various other languages, such as German. Several issues with the label Hamito-Semitic have led many scholars to abandon the term and criticize its continued use. One common objection
10725-575: The African branches of Afroasiatic are very diverse; this suggests the rapid spread of Semitic out of Africa. Proponents of an origin of Afroasiatic within Africa assume the proto-language to have been spoken by pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers , arguing that there is no evidence of words in Proto-Afroasiatic related to agriculture or animal husbandry. Christopher Ehret, S.O. Y. Keita, and Paul Newman also argue that archaeology does not support
10868-561: The Canaanite languages (including Hebrew), as well as the Ethiopian Semitic languages such as Ge'ez and Amharic. The classification within West Semitic remains contested. The only group with an African origin is Ethiopian Semitic. The oldest written attestations of Semitic languages come from Mesopotamia, Northern Syria, and Egypt and date as early as c. 3000 BCE. There are also other proposed branches, but none has so far convinced
11011-817: The Chinese word yeren ( 野人 ; 'wild men', 'savage', 'rustic people' ) as the name for Lisu people . As exonyms develop for places of significance for speakers of the language of the exonym, consequently, many European capitals have English exonyms, for example: In contrast, historically less-prominent capitals such as Ljubljana and Zagreb do not have English exonyms, but do have exonyms in languages spoken nearby, e.g. German : Laibach and Agram (the latter being obsolete); Italian : Lubiana and Zagabria . Madrid , Berlin , Oslo , and Amsterdam , with identical names in most major European languages , are exceptions. Some European cities might be considered partial exceptions, in that whilst
11154-456: The Egyptian word rmṯ ("person")—and Erythraean —referring to the core area around which the languages are spoken, the Red Sea —have also been proposed. Scholars generally consider Afroasiatic to have between five and eight branches. The five that are universally agreed upon are Berber (also called "Libyco-Berber"), Chadic , Cushitic , Egyptian , and Semitic . Most specialists consider
11297-651: The Greeks thought that all non-Greeks were uncultured and so called them " barbarians ", which eventually gave rise to the exonym " Berber ". Exonyms often describe others as "foreign-speaking", "non-speaking", or "nonsense-speaking". One example is the Slavic term for the Germans, nemtsi , possibly deriving from plural of nemy ("mute"); standard etymology has it that the Slavic peoples referred to their Germanic neighbors as "mutes" because they could not speak
11440-455: The Horn of Africa, Egypt, and the eastern Sahara. A significant minority of scholars argues for an origin in the Levant . The reconstructed timelines of when Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken vary extensively, with dates ranging from 18,000 BC to 8,000 BC. Even the latest plausible dating makes Afroasiatic the oldest language family accepted by contemporary linguists. Comparative study of Afroasiatic
11583-423: The Horn of Africa”. A significant minority of scholars supports an Asian origin of Afroasiatic, most of whom are specialists in Semitic or Egyptian studies. The main proponent of an Asian origin is the linguist Alexander Militarev , who argues that Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken by early agriculturalists in the Levant and subsequently spread to Africa. Militarev associates the speakers of Proto-Afroasiatic with
11726-542: The Levantine Post- Natufian Culture , arguing that the reconstructed lexicon of flora and fauna, as well as farming and pastoralist vocabulary indicates that Proto-AA must have been spoken in this area. Scholar Jared Diamond and archaeologist Peter Bellwood have taken up Militarev's arguments as part of their general argument that the spread of linguistic macrofamilies (such as Indo-European, Bantu, and Austro-Asiatic) can be associated with
11869-613: The Portuguese Colónia closely reflects the Latin original. In some cases, no standardised spelling is available, either because the language itself is unwritten (even unanalysed) or because there are competing non-standard spellings. Use of a misspelled endonym is perhaps more problematic than the respectful use of an existing exonym. Finally, an endonym may be a plural noun and may not naturally extend itself to adjectival usage in another language like English, which has
12012-529: The Province of Guangdong ( 广东 ; Guǎngdōng ). However, older English exonyms are sometimes used in certain contexts, for example: Peking (Beijing; duck , opera , etc.), Tsingtao (Qingdao), and Canton (Guangdong). In some cases the traditional English exonym is based on a local Chinese variety instead of Mandarin , in the case of Xiamen , where the name Amoy is closer to the Hokkien pronunciation. In
12155-510: The Russians used the village name of Chechen , medieval Europeans took the tribal name Tatar as emblematic for the whole Mongolic confederation (and then confused it with Tartarus , a word for Hell , to produce Tartar ), and the Magyar invaders were equated with the 500-years-earlier Hunnish invaders in the same territory, and were called Hungarians . The Germanic invaders of
12298-797: The Semitic Amharic language with 25 million, and the Cushitic Somali language with 15 million. Other Afroasiatic languages with millions of native speakers include the Semitic Tigrinya and Modern Hebrew , the Cushitic Sidaama , and the Omotic Wolaitta language , though most languages within the family are much smaller in size. There are many well-attested Afroasiatic languages from antiquity that have since died or gone extinct , including Egyptian and
12441-407: The Semitic languages Akkadian , Biblical Hebrew , Phoenician , Amorite , and Ugaritic . There is no consensus among historical linguists as to precisely where or when the common ancestor of all Afroasiatic languages, known as Proto-Afroasiatic , was originally spoken. However, most agree that the Afroasiatic homeland was located somewhere in northeastern Africa, with specific proposals including
12584-454: The UK in 1947, many regions and cities have been renamed in accordance with local languages, or to change the English spelling to more closely match the indigenous local name. The name Madras , now Chennai , may be a special case . When the city was first settled by English people , in the early 17th century, both names were in use. They possibly referred to different villages which were fused into
12727-539: The ancient Libyco-Berber script, which now exists in the form of Tifinagh . Today, they may also be written in the Berber Latin alphabet or the Arabic script , with Latin being the most pervasive. The Berber languages have a similar level of variety to the Romance languages , although they are sometimes referred to as a single collective language, often as "Berber", "Tamazight", or "Amazigh". The languages, with
12870-430: The case of Beijing , the adoption of the exonym by media outlets quickly gave rise to a hyperforeignised pronunciation, with the result that many English speakers actualize the j in Beijing as / ʒ / . One exception of Pinyin standardization in mainland China is the spelling of the province Shaanxi , which is the mixed Gwoyeu Romatzyh –Pinyin spelling of the province. That is because if Pinyin were used to spell
13013-533: The case of Zenaga and Tuareg. Kossmann roughly groups the Berber languages into seven blocks: The Zenatic block is typically divided into the Zenati and Eastern Berber branches, due to the marked difference in features at each end of the continuum. Otherwise, subclassifications by different linguists typically combine various blocks into different branches. Western Moroccan languages, Zenati languages, Kabyle, and Ghadames may be grouped under Northern Berber ; Awjila
13156-409: The case of endonyms and exonyms of language names (glossonyms), Chinese , German , and Dutch , for example, are English-language exonyms for the languages that are endonymously known as Zhōngwén ( 中文 ), Deutsch , and Nederlands , respectively. By their relation to endonyms, all exonyms can be divided into three main categories: Sometimes, a place name may be unable to use many of
13299-575: The development of agriculture; they argue that there is clear archaeological support for farming spreading from the Levant into Africa via the Nile valley. Afroasiatic languages share a number of phonetic and phonological features. Egyptian, Cushitic, Berber, Omotic, and most languages in the Semitic branch require every syllable to begin with a consonant (with the exception of some grammatical prefixes). Igor Diakonoff argues that this constraint goes back to Proto-Afroasiatic. Some Chadic languages allow
13442-446: The different languages, central vowels are often inserted to break up consonant clusters (a form of epenthesis ). Various Semitic, Cushitic, Berber, and Chadic languages, including Arabic, Amharic, Berber, Somali, and East Dangla, also exhibit various types of vowel harmony . The majority of AA languages are tonal languages : phonemic tonality is found in Omotic, Chadic, and Cushitic languages, but absent in Berber and Semitic. There
13585-864: The endonym Nederland is singular, while all the aforementioned translations except Irish are plural. Exonyms can also be divided into native and borrowed, e.g., from a third language. For example, the Slovene exonyms Dunaj ( Vienna ) and Benetke ( Venice ) are native, but the Avar name of Paris, Париж ( Parizh ) is borrowed from Russian Париж ( Parizh ), which comes from Polish Paryż , which comes from Italian Parigi . A substantial proportion of English-language exonyms for places in continental Europe are borrowed (or adapted) from French; for example: Many exonyms result from adaptations of an endonym into another language, mediated by differences in phonetics, while others may result from translation of
13728-404: The endonym, or as a reflection of the specific relationship an outsider group has with a local place or geographical feature. According to James Matisoff , who introduced the term autonym into linguistics , exonyms can also arise from the "egocentric" tendency of in-groups to identify themselves with "mankind in general", producing an endonym that out groups would not use, while another source
13871-487: The establishment of cognates throughout the family have confirmed its genetic validity . There is no consensus as to when Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken. The absolute latest date for when Proto-Afroasiatic could have been extant is c. 4000 BCE , after which Egyptian and the Semitic languages are firmly attested. However, in all likelihood these languages began to diverge well before this hard boundary. The estimations offered by scholars as to when Proto-Afroasiatic
14014-426: The evolution of Chadic (and likely also Omotic) serving as pertinent examples. Likewise, no consensus exists as to where proto-Afroasiatic originated. Scholars have proposed locations for the Afroasiatic homeland across Africa and West Asia. Roger Blench writes that the debate possesses "a strong ideological flavor", with associations between an Asian origin and "high civilization". An additional complicating factor
14157-631: The exception of Zenaga, Tetserret, and Tuareg, the Berber languages form a dialect continuum . Different linguists take different approaches towards drawing boundaries between languages in this continuum. Maarten Kossmann notes that it is difficult to apply the classic tree model of historical linguistics towards the Berber languages: [The Berber language family]'s continuous history of convergence and differentiation along new lines makes an definition of branches arbitrary. Moreover, mutual intelligibility and mutual influence render notions such as "split" or "branching" rather difficult to apply except, maybe, in
14300-566: The existence of "Hamitic languages" was Marcel Cohen in 1924, with skepticism also expressed by A. Klingenheben and Dietrich Westermann during the 1920s and '30s. However, Meinhof's "Hamitic" classification remained prevalent throughout the early 20th century until it was definitively disproven by Joseph Greenberg in the 1940s, based on racial and anthropological data. Instead, Greenberg proposed an Afroasiatic family consisting of five branches: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, and Semitic. Reluctance among some scholars to recognize Chadic as
14443-503: The fact that it is the only major language family with large populations in both Africa and Asia. Due to concerns that "Afroasiatic" could imply the inclusion of all languages spoken across Africa and Asia, the name "Afrasian" ( Russian : afrazijskije ) was proposed by Igor Diakonoff in 1980. At present it predominantly sees use among Russian scholars. The names Lisramic —based on the Afroasiastic root *lis- ("tongue") and
14586-555: The historical event called the Nanking Massacre (1937) uses the city's older name because that was the name of the city at the time of occurrence. Likewise, many Korean cities like Busan and Incheon (formerly Pusan and Inchǒn respectively) also underwent changes in spelling due to changes in romanization, even though the Korean pronunciations have largely stayed the same. Exonyms and endonyms must not be confused with
14729-436: The homeland near the geographic center of its present distribution, "in the southeastern Sahara or adjacent Horn of Africa." The Afroasiatic languages spoken in Africa are not more closely related to each other than they are to Semitic, as one would expect if only Semitic had remained in a West Asian homeland while all other branches had spread from there. Likewise, all Semitic languages are fairly similar to each other, whereas
14872-457: The inclusion of Tamazight as an official language. The 2000 Charter for Education Reform marked a change in policy, with its statement of "openness to Tamazight." Planning for a public Tamazight-language TV network began in 2006; in 2010, the Moroccan government launched Tamazight TV . On July 29, 2011, Tamazight was added as an official language to the Moroccan constitution. After gaining independence from France in 1962, Algeria committed to
15015-527: The language official status and introducing it in some schools. After gaining independence from France in 1956, Morocco began a period of Arabisation through 1981, with primary and secondary school education gradually being changed to Arabic instruction, and with the aim of having administration done in Arabic, rather than French. During this time, there were riots amongst the Amazigh population, which called for
15158-405: The languages share a number of common features. One of the most important for establishing membership in the branch is a common set of pronouns. Other widely shared features include a prefix m- which creates nouns from verbs, evidence for alternations between the vowel "a" and a high vowel in the forms of the verb, similar methods of marking gender and plurality, and some details of phonology such as
15301-888: The largest family in Afroasiatic by number of extant languages. The Chadic languages are typically divided into three major branches, East Chadic, Central Chadic, and West Chadic. Most Chadic languages are located in the Chad Basin , with the exception of Hausa . Hausa is the largest Chadic language by native speakers, and is spoken by a large number of people as a lingua franca in Northern Nigeria. It may have as many as 80 to 100 million first and second language speakers. Eight other Chadic languages have around 100,000 speakers; other Chadic languages often have few speakers and may be in danger of going extinct. Only about 40 Chadic languages have been fully described by linguists. There are about 30 Cushitic languages, more if Omotic
15444-820: The letters when transliterated into an exonym because of the corresponding language's lack of common sounds. Māori , having only one liquid consonant , is an example of this here. London (originally Latin : Londinium ), for example, is known by the cognate exonyms: An example of a translated exonym is the name for the Netherlands ( Nederland in Dutch) used, respectively, in German ( Niederlande ), French ( Pays-Bas ), Italian ( Paesi Bassi ), Spanish ( Países Bajos ), Irish ( An Ísiltír ), Portuguese ( Países Baixos ) and Romanian ( Țările de Jos ), all of which mean " Low Countries ". However,
15587-602: The method's inability to detect various strong commonalities even between well-studied branches of AA. A relationship between Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic and the Berber languages was perceived as early as the 9th century CE by the Hebrew grammarian and physician Judah ibn Quraysh , who is regarded as a forerunner of Afroasiatic studies. The French orientalist Guillaume Postel had also pointed out similarities between Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic in 1538, and Hiob Ludolf noted similarities also to Ge'ez and Amharic in 1701. This family
15730-422: The most common names for the family are Afroasiatic (or Afro-Asiatic ), Hamito-Semitic , and Semito-Hamitic . Other proposed names that have yet to find widespread acceptance include Erythraic / Erythraean , Lisramic , Noahitic , and Lamekhite . Friedrich Müller introduced the name Hamito-Semitic to describe the family in his Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft (1876). The variant Semito-Hamitic
15873-434: The number of exonyms were over-optimistic and not possible to realise in an intended way. The reason would appear to be that many exonyms have become common words in a language and can be seen as part of the language's cultural heritage. In some situations, the use of exonyms can be preferred. For instance, in multilingual cities such as Brussels , which is known for its linguistic tensions between Dutch- and French-speakers,
16016-594: The other Afroasiatic languages, but the idea was controversial: many scholars refused to admit that the largely unwritten, " Negroid " Chadic languages were in the same family as the " Caucasian " ancient civilizations of the Egyptians and Semites. An important development in the history of Afroasiatic scholarship – and the history of African linguistics – was the creation of the " Hamitic theory " or "Hamitic hypothesis" by Lepsius, fellow Egyptologist Christian Bunsen , and linguist Christian Bleek . This theory connected
16159-435: The poor state of present documentation and understanding of particular language families (historically with Egyptian, presently with Omotic). Gene Gragg likewise argues that more needs to be known about Omotic still, and that Afroasiatic linguists have still not found convincing isoglosses on which to base genetic distinctions. One way of avoiding the problem of determining which features are original and which are inherited
16302-588: The population. After the 1994-1995 general school boycott in Kabylia, Tamazight was recognized for the first time as a national language. In 2002, following the riots of the Black Spring , Tamazight was recognized for the second time as a national language , though not as an official one. This was done on April 8, 2003. Tamazight has been taught for three hours a week through the first three years of Algerian middle schools since 2005. On January 5, 2016, it
16445-483: The possibility of widespread borrowing both within Afroasiatic and from unrelated languages. There are nevertheless a number of commonly observed features in Afroasiatic morphology and derivation, including the use of suffixes , infixes , vowel lengthening and shortening as a morphological change, as well as the use of tone changes to indicate morphology. Further commonalities and differences are explored in more detail below. A widely attested feature in AA languages
16588-453: The presence of pharyngeal fricatives . Other features found in multiple branches include a specialized verb conjugation using suffixes (Egyptian, Semitic, Berber), a specialized verb conjugation using prefixes (Semitic, Berber, Cushitic), verbal prefixes deriving middle (t-), causative (s-), and passive (m-) verb forms (Semitic, Berber, Egyptian, Cushitic), and a suffix used to derive adjectives (Egyptian, Semitic). In current scholarship,
16731-420: The presence or absence of morphological features is not a useful way of discerning subgroupings in Afroasiatic, because it can not be excluded that families currently lacking certain features did not have them in the past; this also means that the presence of morphological features cannot be taken as defining a subgroup. Peust notes that other factors that can obscure genetic relationships between languages include
16874-557: The pronunciation for several names of Chinese cities such as Beijing and Nanjing has not changed for quite some time while in Mandarin Chinese (although the prestige dialect shifted from Nanjing dialect to Beijing dialect during the 19th century), they were called Peking and Nanking in English due to the older Chinese postal romanization convention, based largely on the Nanjing dialect . Pinyin , based largely on
17017-520: The propensity to use the adjectives for describing culture and language. Sometimes the government of a country tries to endorse the use of an endonym instead of traditional exonyms outside the country: Following the 1979 declaration of Hanyu Pinyin spelling as the standard romanisation of Chinese , many Chinese endonyms have successfully replaced English exonyms, especially city and most provincial names in mainland China , for example: Beijing ( 北京 ; Běijīng ), Qingdao ( 青岛 ; Qīngdǎo ), and
17160-474: The province, it would be indistinguishable from its neighboring province Shanxi , where the pronunciations of the two provinces only differ by tones, which are usually not written down when used in English. In Taiwan, however, the standardization of Hanyu Pinyin has only seen mixed results. In Taipei , most (but not all) street and district names shifted to Hanyu Pinyin. For example, the Sinyi District
17303-563: The results of geographical renaming as in the case of Saint Petersburg , which became Petrograd ( Петроград ) in 1914, Leningrad ( Ленинград ) in 1924, and again Saint Petersburg ( Санкт-Петербург , Sankt-Peterbúrg ) in 1991. In this case, although Saint Petersburg has a Dutch etymology, it was never a Dutch exonym for the city between 1914 and 1991, just as Nieuw Amsterdam , the Dutch name of New York City until 1664,
17446-778: The root. Roots that may have contained sequences that were possible in Proto-Afroasiatic but are disallowed in the daughter languages are assumed to have undergone consonant dissimilation or assimilation . A set of constraints, developed originally by Joseph Greenberg on the basis of Arabic, has been claimed to be typical for Afroasiatic languages. Greenberg divided Semitic consonants into four types: "back consonants" ( glottal , pharyngeal , uvular , laryngeal , and velar consonants ), "front consonants" ( dental or alveolar consonants ), liquid consonants , and labial consonants . He showed that, generally, any consonant from one of these groups could combine with consonants from any other group, but could not be used together with consonants from
17589-551: The same group. Additionally, he showed that Proto-Semitic restricted a sequence of two identical consonants in the first and second position of the triliteral root. These rules also have a number of exceptions: Similar exceptions can be demonstrated for the other AA branches that have these restrictions to their root formation. James P. Allen has demonstrated that slightly different rules apply to Egyptian: for instance, Egyptian allows two identical consonants in some roots, and disallows velars from occurring with pharyngeals. There
17732-475: The spelling is the same across languages, the pronunciation can differ. For example, the city of Paris is spelled the same way in French and English, but the French pronunciation [ paʁi ] is different from the English pronunciation [ ˈpærɪs ]. For places considered to be of lesser significance, attempts to reproduce local names have been made in English since the time of the Crusades . Livorno , for instance,
17875-574: The split of the group from the other Afroasiatic sub-phyla is much earlier, and is therefore sometimes associated with the local Mesolithic Capsian culture . A number of extinct populations are believed to have spoken Afroasiatic languages of the Berber branch. According to Peter Behrens and Marianne Bechaus-Gerst, linguistic evidence suggests that the peoples of the C-Group culture in present-day southern Egypt and northern Sudan spoke Berber languages. The Nilo-Saharan Nobiin language today contains
18018-543: The subject of debate due to its historical background as an exonym and present equivalence with the Arabic word for "barbarian." One group, the Linguasphere Observatory , has attempted to introduce the neologism "Tamazic languages" to refer to the Berber languages. Amazigh people typically use "Tamazight" when speaking English. Historically, Berbers did not refer to themselves as Berbers/Amazigh but had their own terms to refer to themselves. For example,
18161-448: The surveyed population, or roughly 28.2% of the surveyed population combined. The 2014 census found that 14.1% of the population spoke Tashelhit, 7.9% spoke Central Atlas Tamazight, and 4% spoke Tarifit, or about 26% of the population combined. These estimates, as well as the estimates from various academic sources, are summarized as follows: Algeria is the country with the second greatest number of speakers of Berber languages. In 1906,
18304-419: The throat than the others; they can be realized variously as glottalized , pharyngealized , uvularized , ejective , and/or implosive consonants in the different branches. It is generally agreed that only the obstruents had a contrast between voiceless and voiced forms in Proto-Afroasiatic, whereas continuants were voiceless. A form of long-distance consonant assimilation known as consonant harmony
18447-461: The total population speaking Berber languages in Algeria, excluding the thinly populated Sahara region, was estimated at 1,305,730 out of 4,447,149, or 29%. Secondary sources disagree on the percentage of self-declared native Berber speakers in the 1966 census, the last Algerian census containing a question about the mother tongue. Some give 17.9% while other report 19%. Kabyle speakers account for
18590-659: The total vocabulary of the Kabyle language and represent 51.7% of the total vocabulary of Tarifit . Almost all Berber languages took from Arabic the pharyngeal fricatives /ʕ/ and /ħ/, the (nongeminated) uvular stop /q/, and the voiceless pharyngealized consonant /ṣ/. Unlike the Chadic , Cushitic , and Omotic languages of the Afro-Asiatic phylum, Berber languages are not tonal languages. "Tamazight" and "Berber languages" are often used interchangeably. However, "Tamazight"
18733-710: The use of exonyms to avoid this kind of problem. For example, it is now common for Spanish speakers to refer to the Turkish capital as Ankara rather than use the Spanish exonym Angora . Another example, it is now common for Italian speakers to refer to some African states as Mauritius and Seychelles rather than use the Italian exonyms Maurizio and Seicelle . According to the United Nations Statistics Division : Time has, however, shown that initial ambitious attempts to rapidly decrease
18876-1206: The vast majority of speakers of Berber languages in Algeria. Shawiya is the second most commonly spoken Berber language in Algeria. Other Berber languages spoken in Algeria include: Shenwa , with 76,300 speakers; Tashelhit, with 6,000 speakers; Ouargli , with 20,000 speakers; Tamahaq , with 71,400 speakers; Tugurt , with 8,100 speakers; Tidikelt , with 1,000 speakers; Gurara , with 11,000 speakers; and Mozabite , with 150,000 speakers. Population estimates are summarized as follows: As of 1998, there were an estimated 450,000 Tawellemmet speakers, 250,000 Air Tamajeq speakers, and 20,000 Tamahaq speakers in Niger . As of 2018 and 2014 respectively, there were an estimated 420,000 speakers of Tawellemmet and 378,000 of Tamasheq in Mali . As of 2022, based on figures from 2020, Ethnologue estimates there to be 285,890 speakers of Berber languages in Libya : 247,000 speakers of Nafusi , 22,800 speakers of Tamahaq, 13,400 speakers of Ghadamés , and 2,690 speakers of Awjila . The number of Siwi speakers in Libya
19019-609: The vowels found in a given stem are dependent on the vocalic template. In Chadic, verb stems can include an inherent vowel as well. Most Semitic verbs are triliteral (have three consonants), whereas most Chadic, Omotic, and Cushitic verbs are biliteral (having two consonants). The degree to which the Proto-AA verbal root was triliteral is debated. It may have originally been mostly biconsonantal, to which various affixes (such as verbal extensions ) were then added and lexicalized. Although any root could theoretically be used to create
19162-429: The written ancient languages known from its area, Meroitic or Old Nubian . The oldest text in a Cushitic language probably dates from around 1770; written orthographies were only developed for a select number of Cushitic languages in the early 20th century. The Egyptian branch consists of a single language, Egyptian (often called "Ancient Egyptian"), which was historically spoken in the lower Nile Valley. Egyptian
19305-540: The years, the endonym may have undergone phonetic changes, either in the original language or the borrowing language, thus changing an endonym into an exonym, as in the case of Paris , where the s was formerly pronounced in French. Another example is the endonym for the German city of Cologne , where the Latin original of Colonia has evolved into Köln in German, while the Italian and Spanish exonym Colonia or
19448-527: Was Leghorn because it was an Italian port essential to English merchants and, by the 18th century, to the British Navy ; not far away, Rapallo , a minor port on the same sea, never received an exonym. In earlier times, the name of the first tribe or village encountered became the exonym for the whole people beyond. Thus, the Romans used the tribal names Graecus (Greek) and Germanus (Germanic),
19591-532: Was announced that Tamazight had been added as a national and official language in a draft amendment to the Algerian constitution; it was added to the constitution as a national and official language on February 7, 2016. Although regional councils in Libya's Nafusa Mountains affiliated with the National Transitional Council reportedly use the Berber language of Nafusi and have called for it to be granted co-official status with Arabic in
19734-480: Was developed following the introduction of the Latin script in the nineteenth century by the West. The nineteenth century also saw the development of Neo-Tifinagh, an adaptation of Tuareg Tifinagh for use with other Berber languages. There are now three writing systems in use for Berber languages: Tifinagh, the Arabic script, and the Berber Latin alphabet , with the Latin alphabet being the most widely used today. With
19877-628: Was formally described and named "Semitic" by August Ludwig von Schlözer in 1781. In 1844, Theodor Benfey first described the relationship between Semitic and the Egyptian language and connected both to the Berber and the Cushitic languages (which he called "Ethiopic"). In the same year T.N. Newman suggested a relationship between Semitic and the Hausa language, an idea that was taken up by early scholars of Afroasiatic. In 1855, Ernst Renan named these languages, related to Semitic but not Semitic, "Hamitic," in 1860 Carl Lottner proposed that they belonged to
20020-540: Was replaced by Arabic as the spoken language of Egypt, but Coptic continues to be the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church . The c. 30 Omotic languages are still mostly undescribed by linguists. They are all spoken in southwest Ethiopia except for the Ganza language , spoken in Sudan. Omotic is typically split into North Omotic (or Aroid) and South Omotic, with the latter more influenced by
20163-419: Was spoken vary widely, ranging from 18,000 BCE to 8,000 BCE. An estimate at the youngest end of this range still makes Afroasiatic the oldest proven language family. Contrasting proposals of an early emergence, Tom Güldemann has argued that less time may have been required for the divergence than is usually assumed, as it is possible for a language to rapidly restructure due to areal contact , with
20306-683: Was the father of the Jews , Assyrians , and Arameans , while Ham was the father of the Egyptians and Cushites . This genealogy does not reflect the actual origins of these peoples' languages: for example, the Canaanites are descendants of Ham according to the Table, even though Hebrew is now classified as a Canaanite language , while the Elamites are ascribed to Shem despite their language being totally unrelated to Hebrew. The term Semitic for
20449-623: Was the first language to branch off, often followed by Chadic. In contrast to scholars who argue for an early split of Chadic from Afroasiatic, scholars of the Russian school tend to argue that Chadic and Egyptian are closely related, and scholars who rely on percentage of shared lexicon often group Chadic with Berber. Three scholars who agree on an early split between Omotic and the other subbranches, but little else, are Harold Fleming (1983), Christopher Ehret (1995), and Lionel Bender (1997). In contrast, scholars relying on shared lexicon often produce
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