Tifinagh

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Tifinagh

Tifinagh ( in Neo-Tifinagh, in Berber Latin alphabet

Berber Latin alphabet

The Berber Latin alphabet is the version of the Latin alphabet used to write Northern Berber languages. It uses the 23 standard letters, 7 modified letters and borrows 2 letters from the Greek alphabet....
, ) is an alphabet

Alphabet

An alphabet is a standardized set of letter basic written symbols each of which roughly represents a phoneme, a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past....
ic script used by some Berber

Berber

Berber may refer to:*a member of the Berber people**the Berber languages, a family of Afro-Asiatic languages**Berberism, a political-cultural supporting a distinct Berber identity....
peoples, notably the Tuareg

Tuareg

The Tuareg are a nomadic pastoralist people. They are the principal inhabitants of the Saharan interior of North Africa. They call themselves variously Kel Tamasheq or Kel Tamajaq , Imuhagh, Imazaghan or Imashaghen , or Kel Tagelmust, i.e., "People of the Veil"....
, to write their language. The Berbers are the indigenous peoples of North Africa west of the Nile Valley. It is not in widespread use as a means of daily communication, but often serves to politically and symbolically assert a Berber identity.

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Encyclopedia

Tifinagh ( in Neo-Tifinagh, in Berber Latin alphabet

Berber Latin alphabet

Alphabet

Berber

Tuareg

Moroccan

Moroccan may refer to:* Something of, from, or related to Morocco, ia country located in North Africa** A person from Morocco, or of Moroccan descent....
elementary schools in teaching the Berber language to children.

Tifinagh or Neo-Tifinagh?

Linguists and historians tend to be specific in distinguishing between the millennia-old Berber which is Tifinagh; and the Neo-Tifinagh script which is based on the old one but contains more vowels and consonants.

The old Tifinagh script is found engraved in stones and tombs in some historical sites in nothern Algeria, in Tunisia, and in Tuareg areas in the African Sahara.

The Neo-Tifinagh script was developed and computerized in the 20th century mainly by Moroccan and Algerian researchers some of them based in Europe.

History

An older version of Tifinagh was more widely used by speakers of North Africa. It is attested from the 3rd century BC to the 3rd century AD.

There are two variants: eastern and western.
The eastern variant was used in what is now Constantine
Constantine, Algeria

Constantine is the capital of Constantine Province in north-eastern Algeria. Slightly inland, it is about 80 kilometers from the Mediterranean Sea coast....
, the Aures region and Tunisia
Tunisia

Tunisia , officially the Tunisian Republic , is a country located in North Africa. It is bordered by Algeria to the west and Libya to the southeast....
. It is the best-deciphered variant, due to the discovery of several Numidian bilingual inscriptions in Libyan and Punic
Punic

The Punics, were a group of western Semitic-speaking peoples originating from Carthage in North Africa who traced their origins to a group of Phoenician and Cypriot settlers, but also to North African Berbers....
(notably at Dougga
Dougga

Dougga or Thugga is a Ancient Rome ruin in northern Tunisia located on a 65 hectare site.Dougga was originally a fortified Berber people village ....
in Tunisia.) 22 letters out of the 24 were deciphered.
The western variant was more primitive (Février (1964–1965). It was used along the Mediterranean coast from Kabylie
Kabylie

Kabylie or Kabylia is a region in the north of Algeria.It is part of the Tell Atlas and is located at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea....
to the Canary Islands
Canary Islands

The Canary Islands are a Spain archipelago which, in turn, forms one of the Spanish Autonomous Communities and an Outermost Region of the European Union....
. It used 13 supplementary letters.
The Libyco-Berber script was a pure Abjad
Abjad

An abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel. It is a term suggested by Peter T....
, it had no vowels.
Gemination
Gemination

In phonetics, gemination happens when a spoken consonant is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a short consonant.Consonant length is distinctive in some languages, for instance Arabic language, Estonian language, Finnish language, Russian language, Hebrew language, Hungarian language, Italian language, Japanese language, L...
was not marked.
The writing was usually from the bottom to the top, although right-to-left, and even other orders, were also found.

The Traditional Tifinagh (Tuareg)

Traditionally, the script marks no vowels, except word-finally; however, various proposals to allow it to mark vowels have been made in recent times. In some areas, Arabic vowel diacritics are combined with Tifinagh characters to mark vowels.

Occasionally the script has been used to write other neighboring languages, such as Tagdal Songhai

Songhay languages

The Songhay, Songhai, or Songai languages are a group of closely related languages/dialects centered on the middle stretches of the Niger River in the west African nations of Mali, Niger, and Benin....
.

The Neo-Tifinagh script

Salem Chaker, professor at INALCO

Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales

The Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales is located in Paris, France. It was founded in 1795 under the French Revolution and is now one of the country's Grands ?tablissements with a specialization in African, Asian, East European, Oceanian languages and civilisations....
had proposed a change in Neo-Tifinagh (Tafsut 1990 #14).

Until recently, virtually no books or websites were published in this alphabet, with activists favouring Latin (or, more rarely, Arabic) scripts for serious usage; however, it is extremely popular for symbolic use, with many books and websites written in a different script featuring logos or title pages using Neo-Tifinagh. However, in Morocco, the king took a "neutral" position between the claims of Latin script and Arabic script by adopting the Neo-Tifinagh script in 2003; as a result, books are beginning to be published in this script, and it is taught in some schools. Outside Morocco, it has no official status. Ironically, the Moroccan state arrested and imprisoned people using this script during 1980s and the 1990s.

In Libya, the authorithies are, consistently, banning the Neo-Tifinagh script from being used in public like on stores' displays and banners.

Code chart for the Neo-Tifinagh script

Neo-Tifinagh is encoded in the Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....
range U+2D30 to U+2D7F, starting from version 4.1.0. There are 55 defined characters, but there are more characters being used than those defined. In ISO 15924

ISO 15924

ISO 15924, Codes for the representation of names of scripts, defines two sets of codes for a number of writing systems . Each script is given both a four-letter code and a numeric one....
, the code Tfng is assigned to Neo-Tifinagh.

**Unicode representative glyphs chart (in left-to-right direction)**
Code	+0
+4
+8
+C
U+2D30
U+2D40
U+2D50
U+2D60
U+2D70

Here is a comparison chart for the character glyph and the transliteration.

**Color keys**
Color	Meaning
	Basic Tifinagh (IRCAM)
	Extended Tifinagh (IRCAM)
	Other Tifinagh letters
	Modern Tuareg letters
	This position shall not be used

Simple letters (and modifier letter)

Code	Glyph	Unicode	Transliteration		Name
Code	Glyph	Unicode	Latin	Arabic	Name
U+2D30		?	a	?	ya
U+2D31		?	b	?	yab
U+2D32		?	b	?	yab fricative
U+2D33		?	g	?	yag
U+2D34		?	g	?	yag fricative
U+2D35		?	dj	?	Berber Academy yadj
U+2D36		?	dj	?	yadj
U+2D37		?	d	?	yad
U+2D38		?	d	?	yad fricative
U+2D39		?		?
U+2D3A		?		?
U+2D3B		?	e	?	yey
U+2D3C		?	f	?	yaf
U+2D3D		?	k	?	yak
U+2D3E		?	k	?	Tuareg yak
U+2D3F		?	k	?	yak fricative
U+2D40		?	h b	? ?	yah = Tuareg yab
U+2D41		?	h	?	Berber Academy yah
U+2D42		?	h	?	Tuareg yah
U+2D43		?		?
U+2D44		?	(e)	?	yae
U+2D45		?	kh (x)	?	yax
U+2D46		?	kh (x)	?	Tuareg yax
U+2D47		?	q	?	yaq
U+2D48		?	q	?	Tuareg yaq
U+2D49		?	i	?	yi
U+2D4A		?	j	?	yaj
U+2D4B		?	j	?	Ahaggar yaj
U+2D4C		?	j	?	Tuareg yaj

Code	Glyph	Unicode	Transliteration		Name
Code	Glyph	Unicode	Latin	Arabic	Name
U+2D4D		?	l	?	yal
U+2D4E		?	m	?	yam
U+2D4F		?	n	?	yan
U+2D50		?	ny	??	Tuareg yagn
U+2D51		?	ng	?	Tuareg yang
U+2D52		?	p	?	yap
U+2D53		?	u w	? ?	yu = Tuareg yaw
U+2D54		?	r	?	yar
U+2D55		?		?
U+2D56		?	gh	?	ya?
U+2D57		?	gh	?	Tuareg ya?
U+2D58		?	gh j	? ?	Aïr ya? = Adrar yaj
U+2D59		?	s	?	yas
U+2D5A		?		?
U+2D5B		?	sh (š)	?	yaš
U+2D5C		?	t	?	yat
U+2D5D		?	t	?	yat fricative
U+2D5E		?	ch (tš)	??	yatš
U+2D5F		?		?
U+2D60		?	v	?	yav
U+2D61		?	w	?	yaw
U+2D62		?	y	?	yay
U+2D63		?	z	?	yaz
U+2D64		?	z	?	Tawellemet yaz = Harpoon yaz
U+2D65		?	?	?	ya?
U+2D6F		?	+^w	?+	Labio-velarization mark = Tamatart = 2D61

Digraph letters (ligatures are possible)

Code	Glyph	Unicode	Transliteration		Name
Code	Glyph	Unicode	Latin	Arabic	Name
U+2D5C U+2D59		??	ts	??	yats
U+2D37 U+2D63		??	dz	??	yadz

Code	Glyph	Unicode	Transliteration		Name
Code	Glyph	Unicode	Latin	Arabic	Name
U+2D5C U+2D5B		??	ch (tš)	??	yatš
U+2D37 U+2D4A		??	dj	??	yadj

Unicode fonts for Neo-Tifinagh

(a stylized ornamental font, not recommended for running text)

Bibliography

Aghali-Zakara, Mohamed (1994). Graphèmes berbères et dilemme de diffusion: Interaction des alphabets , ajami et tifinagh. Etudes et Documents Berbères 11, 107-121.
Aghali-Zakara, Mohamed; and Drouin, Jeanine (1977). Recherches sur les Tifinaghs- Eléments graphiques et sociolinguistiques. Comptes-rendus du Groupe Linguistique des Etudes Chamito-Sémitiques (GLECS).
Ameur, Meftaha (1994). Diversité des transcriptions : pour une notation usuelle et normalisée de la langue berbère. Etudes et Documents Berbères 11, 25-28.
Boukous, Ahmed (1997). Situation sociolinguistique de l’Amazigh. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 123, 41-60.
Chaker, Salem (1994). Pour une notation usuelle à base Tifinagh. Etudes et Documents Berbères 11, 31-42.
Chaker, Salem (1996). Propositions pour la notation usuelle à base du berbère. Etudes et Documents Berbères 14, 239-253.
Chaker, Salem (1997). La Kabylie: un processus de développement linguistique autonome. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 123, 81-99.
Durand, O. (1994). Promotion du berbère : problèmes de standardisation et d’orthographe. Expériences européennes. Etudes et Documents Berbères 11, 7-11.
O’Connor, Michael (1996). The Berber scripts. The World’s Writing Systems, ed. by William Bright and Peter Daniels, 112-116. New York: Oxford University Press.
Savage, Andrew. 2008. Writing Tuareg — the three script options. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 192: 5-14

Encyclopaedia of Islam
Encyclopaedia of Islam

The Encyclopaedia of Islam is the standard encyclopaedia of the academic discipline of Islamic studies. It embraces articles on distinguished Muslims of every age and land, on tribes and dynasties, on the crafts and sciences, on political and religious institutions, on the geography, ethnography, flora and fauna of the various countries...
, s.v. Tifinagh.

External links

http://lbi-project.org/lbi-db.php an excellent compilation of images and information

Official website of the Royal Institute of the Amazigh Culture (in French)
for Moroccan Tifinagh