Puneet Varma (Editor)

Eastern Berber languages

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Geographic distribution:
  
Libya, Egypt

Glottolog:
  
None

Eastern Berber languages

Linguistic classification:
  
Afro-Asiatic Berber Eastern Berber

Subdivisions:
  
Siwi–Sokna–Nafusi Awjila–Ghadamès (β-Berber)

The Eastern Berber languages belong to the Afro-Asiatic family and are spoken in Libya and Egypt. They include Awjila, Sokna and Fezzan (El-Fogaha), Siwi, and Ghadamès, though it is not clear that they form a valid genealogical group.

Classification

Kossmann (1999:29, 33) divides them into two groups:

  • one consisting of Ghadamès and Awjila. These two languages are the only Berber languages to preserve proto-Berber *β as β; elsewhere in Berber it becomes h or disappears.
  • the other consisting of Nafusi (excluding Zuwara and southern Tunisia), Sokna (El-Foqaha), and Siwi. This shares some innovations with Zenati, and others (e.g. the change of *ă to ə and the loss of *β) with Northern Berber in general.

    • Blench (ms, 2006) lists the following as separate languages, with dialects in parentheses; like Ethnologue, he classifies Nafusi as Eastern Zenati.

  • Siwa
  • Awjila
  • Sokna
  • Ghadames
  • Zurg (in Kufra)
  • Fezzan (Tmessa, Al-Foqaha)

    • The "Lingvarium Project" (2005) cites two additional languages: the –extinct– language of Jaghbub, and the –still spoken– Berber language of Tmessa, an oasis located in the north of the Murzuq District. Blažek (1999) considers the language spoken in Tmessa as a dialect of Fezzan.

    References

    Eastern Berber languages Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA