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fanty fanty April 16, 2018 April 16, 2018 at 11:13:35 AM UTC link Permalink

What variety of Berber does Tatoeba's "Berber" refer to?

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Pfirsichbaeumchen Pfirsichbaeumchen April 16, 2018 April 16, 2018 at 2:25:30 PM UTC link Permalink

@Amastan can answer this question for you.

Amastan Amastan April 18, 2018 April 18, 2018 at 11:30:28 PM UTC link Permalink

Yes. Most Berber sentences on Tatoeba are in Kabyle, however, sentences contributed by a few users like Uyezjen (with more than 4000 sentences) are in Mozabite and other dialects. Berber-speakers consider their language as one although some dialects could be very different from others and even the official texts of Algeria and Morocco refer to Berber as one and the same language (officially called Tamazight in Berber and French, and "amazighiyya" in Arabic).

Kabyle is phonologically and diachronically (in historical linguistics) close to the major dialects of central and southern Morocco, but in terms of mutual intelligibility, it is rather close to the Zenata dialects that are spoken in the Berber-speaking areas east (Shawi in the Aures mountains) and west of Kabylie (where the Chenoua dialect is spoken in the Dahra mountains in Algeria).

Some Kabyles who support a separatist movement claim that Kabyle is a separate language but most Berber-language activists reject this view and prefer to work towards bringing the various Berber dialects closer and closer by encouraging the use of both old and modern standard common words and phrases. My main motivation on Tatoeba was precisely to work on that, trying to use as many common traditional words as possible (the type of words referred to as Pan-Berber words by linguists such as "aydi" for "dog" or "tafukt" for "sun") as well as useful modern words that have been coined decades ago but are still unknown to the general public (like "tamsulta" for "police" or "tasdawit" for "university"). Today, I think that Tatoeba's Berber corpus is more than enough to help users learn common and new words, although I know there are countless small details to correct here and there.