The Eastern Berber languages are a group of

Berber languages The Berber languages, also known as the Amazigh languages or Tamazight,, ber, label=Tuareg Tifinagh, ⵜⵎⵣⵗⵜ, ) are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They comprise a group of closely related languages spoken by Berber commun ...

spoken in

Libya Libya (; ar, ليبيا, Lībiyā), officially the State of Libya ( ar, دولة ليبيا, Dawlat Lībiyā), is a country in the Maghreb region in North Africa. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Egypt to the east, Suda ...

and

Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning the North Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via a land bridg ...

. They include

Awjila Awjila ( Berber: ''Awilan'', ''Awjila'', ''Awgila''; ar, أوجلة; Latin: ''Augila'') is an oasis town in the Al Wahat District in the Cyrenaica region of northeastern Libya. Since classical times it has been known as a place where high quality ...

, Sokna and Fezzan (El-Fogaha), Siwi and Ghadamès, though it is not clear that they form a valid

genealogical Genealogy () is the study of families, family history, and the tracing of their lineages. Genealogists use oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kin ...

group. Eastern Berber is generally considered as part of the Zenatic Berber supergroup of Northern Berber.

Classification

Kossmann (1999:29, 33) divides them into two groups: * one consisting of Ghadamès and

. These two languages are the only

to preserve proto-Berber *β as β;Kossmann 1999:61. 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 The East Zenati languages (Blench, 2006) or Tunisian and Zuwara (Kossmann, 2013) are a group of the Zenati Berber dialects spoken in Tunisia and Libya. Maarten Kossmann considers the easternmost varieties of Zenati dialects as transitional to ...

. * Siwa *

* Sokna † * Ghadamès * Zurg † The "Lingvarium Project" (2005) cites two additional languages: the

extinct Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...

language of

Jaghbub Jaghbub ( ar, الجغبوب) is a remote desert village in the Al Jaghbub Oasis in the eastern Libyan Desert. It is actually closer to the Egyptian town of Siwa than to any Libyan town of note. The oasis is located in Butnan District and was th ...

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.Václav Blažek, "Numerals: Comparative-etymological Analyses of Numeral Systems and Their Implications : Saharan, Nubian, Egyptian, Berber, Kartvelian, Uralic, Altaic and Indo-European Languages", in: Filozofická Fakulta: Opera Universitatis Masarykianae vol. 332, p. 57, Facultas Philosophica - Masarykova Univerzita Brno, 1999 ()

Notes

External links

"Oriental Berber", a collaborative blog on the Berber languages of Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt
Eastern Berber languages Berber languages Berbers in Egypt Berbers in Libya Languages of Egypt Languages of Libya {{Berber-lang-stub