ABSTRACT
Despite the modern prevalence throughout North Africa of Arabic, the language of conquest and religion, there exist by survival from pre-Islamic times a number of dialects of that old indigenous Hamitic speech which is called Berber. The Berberspeaking peoples, as a whole, having never arrived at that stage of civilization in which they would have fixed their tongue in a literary medium, the number of dialects is large. Thus is found, with fundamental similarities of syntax and vocabularies, a great variety among such different branches of Berber as the Zenatah, Shawîah, Tamasheḳ, Zenagah, etc., and—a corollary to this instability of the language—it is also to be observed that many loan-words from the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Negroes, and Arabs have crept into Berber speech.
