Tamazight, also known as Amazigh, is spoken by approximately 28 million people across North Africa, including Morocco, Algeria, and Mali, where it holds official status. As part of the Afro-Asiatic family, Tamazight is traditionally written in the Tifinagh script but also uses the Latin alphabet in modern contexts. With an agglutinative structure, two grammatical cases, and a VSO word order, it has a rich oral tradition, encompassing poetry, storytelling, and cultural identity among the Berber communities. (We used Central Atlas Tamazight as our grammatical reference).
Stats
Language Family: Afro-Asiatic
Writing System: Tifinagh, Latin
Writing System Type: Abjad (Tifinagh), Alphabet (Latin)
Writing Direction: L to R
Tones / Pitch Accent: None
Morphology: Agglutinative
Cases: 2
Grammatical Gender / Noun Class: 2
Number of Verb Tenses: 3
Word Order: VSO
Number of Vowels (Monophthongs): 3
Number of Consonants: 32
Areas Where Spoken
Algeria (official) (26.0%) (11.9 mil)
Libya (1.0%) (69 k)
Morocco (official) (33.0%) (12.5 mil)
Mali (official) (3.5%) (815 k)
Mauritania (1.2%) (58 k)
Niger (10.4%) (2.83 mil)
Western Sahara (2.0%) (13 k)