Language/Standard-moroccan-tamazight/Culture/History
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ORIGIN OF THE BERBER LANGUAGE
Standard Moroccan Amazigh (Standard Moroccan Tamazight: ⵜⴰⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⵜ ⵜⴰⵏⴰⵡⴰⵢⵜ), (Arabic: الأمازيغية المعيارية), also known as Standard Moroccan Berber, is a standardized national Moroccan variety of the Berber language.
- Despite the hesitations and the various hypotheses put forward for more than a century and a half, the affiliation * of the Berber language is beyond doubt: Berber is one of the branches of the great Chamito-Semitic (or "Afro -Asiatic ", according to the American terminology initiated by J. Greenberg), which includes, in addition to Berber, Semitic, Couchitic, Egyptian (ancient) and, with a more distant degree of kinship, the" Chadic "group "whose most famous representative is the Hausa.
- This notion of linguistic kinship, often very ideologized, is, it should be remembered, precisely defined and relative: it is strictly linguistic in nature and does not imply anything in terms of anthropology (origin of settlements) and / or culture. It is always relative in time and comes up against the chronological limits of the methods of linguistic comparison: the connections that can be seriously established never go back beyond the ancient Neolithic period: however, there is a "before »And the history of humanity, peoples and languages, does not begin with polished stone and agriculture!
- In particular, it is good to insist on the fact that the Chamito-Semitic kinship of Berber in no way implies a "coming from the Middle East (Semitic) or from East Africa" ... On the contrary, everything indicates, both prehistoric and linguistic data, a very great antiquity of Berber in North Africa (Cf. Chaker 2006b). In consideration of the profound unity of Berber over a considerable area, one could even quite legitimately hypothesize that the initial cradle of the Chamito-Semitic languages, contrary to all the classical theses, could well be North Africa, alone. mole of stability and continuity in the Chamito-Semitic ensemble, from which the branches and languages of the family would have diversified, by migration to the South-East (Cushitic and Chadic domain), to the East (Egyptian domain and Semitic). In any case, the hypothesis is no less legitimate than all the others issued previously and even seems to be supported by the linguistic material, notably grammatical, because the Berber system often appears both as prototypical and particularly transparent in the Chamito-Semetic ensemble ...
- In any case, Berber can be considered as the "autochthonous" language of North Africa and there is currently no positive trace of an external origin or the presence of a pre-existing substrate. / non-Berber in this region. As far as we can go back - that is to say from the first Egyptian testimonies (Cf. Bates 1914 (1970)) - Berber has already settled in its current territory. The toponymy in particular has not so far made it possible to precisely identify any pre-Berber sediment.
With the completion of this lesson, consider investigating these related pages: Standard Moroccan Tamazight Culture: Traditional Tamazight Music, Standard Moroccan Tamazight Culture → Traditional Tamazight ..., History and Origins of Tamazight & Tamazight Literature and Media.