ABSTRACT
The Berber group of languages constitute a branch of the Afro-Asiatic family spoken across wide areas of North Africa; other branches of this large family include Semitic (Arabic, Hebrew), Chadic (Hausa) and Cushitic (Oromo, Somali). For the Greeks and Romans who colonized North Africa, the local inhabitants were βάρβαροί, barbari, who spoke a ‘barbarous’ tongue. The designation found its way into Arabic, and into English as Berber. An ethnonym for the mainstream of Berber tribes is amaziƔen; the language is tamaziƔt/Tamazight, and this term is increasingly used to refer to the most prominent of this close-knit group of languages, with ‘Berber’ used for the grouping as a whole.
