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)
Resources
Mass Resource List
Dictionary
TV
Phrasebook
Textbooks
Google Books Grammaire berbère (rifain, tamazight, chleuh, kabyle) by Michel Quitout (1997)
Google Books Grammaire et conjugaison amazigh by Gaya Hamimi (1997)
Website
Live Lingua: 3 Free Online Tamazight Courses
Asadlis Amazigh: Lots of books for free download
mylanguages.org: Vocab and phrases
YouTube
Video
Playlists
Methode de Tachelhit: Phrases and vocab
Learn Tamazight/ TashelHit: Vocab and phrases
Film tachlhit. Tibdit lwalidin: Film clips