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Mozabite Language
Mozabite (endonym: ''tamazight''), also known as Mzab, ''Tumẓabt'' or Ghardaia, is a Zenati language spoken by the Mozabites, an Ibadi Berber group inhabiting the seven cities of the M'zab natural region in the northern Saharan Algeria. It is also spoken by small numbers of Mozabite emigrants in other local cities and elsewhere. Mozabites also use Algerian Arabic. As of 2010, UNESCO estimated there to be about 150,000 Mozabite speakers. Mozabite is one of the Mzab–Wargla languages, a dialect cluster A dialect is a variety of language spoken by a particular group of people. This may include dominant and standardized varieties as well as vernacular, unwritten, or non-standardized varieties, such as those used in developing countries or iso ... of the Zenati languages. Bibliography * * Delheure, Jean. ''Aǧraw n Yiwalen Tumẓabt d-Tefṛansist = Dictionnaire Mozabite–Francais''. SELAF. Paris, 1984. References External links Aghlandictionary Zenati langua ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
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Algeria
Algeria, officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It is bordered to Algeria–Tunisia border, the northeast by Tunisia; to Algeria–Libya border, the east by Libya; to Algeria–Niger border, the southeast by Niger; to Algeria–Western Sahara border, the southwest by Mali, Mauritania, and Western Sahara; to Algeria–Morocco border, the west by Morocco; and to the north by the Mediterranean Sea. The capital and List of cities in Algeria, largest city is Algiers, located in the far north on the Mediterranean coast. Inhabited since prehistory, Algeria has been at the crossroads of numerous cultures and civilisations, including the Phoenicians, Numidians, Ancient Rome, Romans, Vandals, and Byzantine Greeks. Its modern identity is rooted in centuries of Arab migrations to the Maghreb, Arab Muslim migration waves since Muslim conquest of the Maghreb, the seventh century and the subsequent Arabization, Arabisation ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
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Tifinagh
Tifinagh ( Tuareg Berber language: ; Neo-Tifinagh: ; Berber Latin alphabet: ; ) is a script used to write the Berber languages. Tifinagh is descended from the ancient Libyco-Berber alphabet. The traditional Tifinagh, sometimes called Tuareg Tifinagh, is still favored by the Tuareg people of the Sahara desert in southern Algeria, northeastern Mali, northern Niger, and northern Burkina Faso for writing the Tuareg languages. Neo-Tifinagh is an alphabet developed by the Berber Academy by adopting Tuareg Tifinagh for use for Kabyle; it has been since modified for use across North Africa. Tifinagh is one of three major competing Berber orthographies alongside the Berber Latin alphabet and the Arabic alphabet. Tifinagh is the official script for Tamazight, an official language of Morocco and Algeria. Outside of symbolic cultural uses, Latin remains the dominant script for writing Berber languages throughout North Africa. The ancient Libyco-Berber script was used by the ancient north ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
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Dialect Continuum
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of Variety (linguistics), language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varieties may not be. This is a typical occurrence with widely spread languages and language families around the world, when these languages did not spread recently. Some prominent examples include the Indo-Aryan languages across large parts of India, varieties of Arabic across north Africa and southwest Asia, the Turkic languages, the varieties of Chinese, and parts of the Romance languages, Romance, Germanic languages, Germanic and Slavic languages, Slavic families in Europe. Terms used in older literature include dialect area (Leonard Bloomfield) and L-complex (Charles F. Hockett). Dialect continua typically occur in long-settled agrarian populations, as innovations spread from their various poin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
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Algerian Arabic
Algerian Arabic (, romanized: ), natively known as , or , is a variety of Arabic spoken in Algeria. It belongs to the Maghrebi Arabic dialect continuum and is mostly intelligible with the Tunisian and Moroccan dialects. Darja () means "everyday/colloquial dialect". Like other varieties of Maghrebi Arabic, Algerian Arabic has a mostly Semitic vocabulary. It contains Berber, Punic, and African Romance influences and has some loanwords from French, Andalusi Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and Spanish. Berber loanwords represent 8% to 9% of its vocabulary. Use Algerian Arabic is the native dialect of 75% to 80% of Algerians and is mastered by 85% to 100% of them. It is a spoken language used in daily communication and entertainment, while Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is generally reserved for official use and education. As in the rest of the Arab world, this linguistic situation has been described as diglossia: MSA is nobody's first acquired language; it is learned through f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
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Sahara
The Sahara (, ) is a desert spanning across North Africa. With an area of , it is the largest hot desert in the world and the list of deserts by area, third-largest desert overall, smaller only than the deserts of Antarctica and the northern Arctic. The name "Sahara" is derived from , a broken plural form of ( ), meaning "desert". The desert covers much of North Africa, excluding the fertile region on the Mediterranean Sea coast, the Atlas Mountains of the Maghreb, and the Nile, Nile Valley in Egypt and the Sudan. It stretches from the Red Sea in the east and the Mediterranean in the north to the Atlantic Ocean in the west, where the landscape gradually changes from desert to coastal plains. To the south it is bounded by the Sahel, a belt of Tropical and subtropical grasslands, savannas, and shrublands, semi-arid tropical savanna around the Niger River valley and the Sudan (region), Sudan region of sub-Saharan Africa. The Sahara can be divided into several regions, including ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
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Berbers
Berbers, or the Berber peoples, also known as Amazigh or Imazighen, are a diverse grouping of distinct ethnic groups indigenous to North Africa who predate the arrival of Arab migrations to the Maghreb, Arabs in the Maghreb. Their main connections are identified by their usage of Berber languages, most of them mutually unintelligible, which are part of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. They are indigenous peoples, indigenous to the Maghreb region of North Africa, where they live in scattered communities across parts of Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and to a lesser extent Tunisia, Mauritania, northern Mali and northern Niger. Smaller Berber communities are also found in Burkina Faso and Egypt's Siwa Oasis. Descended from Stone Age tribes of North Africa, accounts of the Imazighen were first mentioned in Egyptian hieroglyphs, Ancient Egyptian writings. From about 2000 BC, Berber languages spread westward from the Nile, Nile Valley across the northern Sahara int ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
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Ibadi
Ibadism (, ) is a school of Islam concentrated in Oman established from within the Kharijites. The followers of the Ibadi sect are known as the Ibadis or, as they call themselves, The People of Truth and Integrity (). Ibadism emerged around 60 years after the Islamic prophet Muhammad's death in AD 632 as a moderate school of the Kharijite movement, although contemporary Ibadis may object to being classified as Kharijites. Ibadis are much less numerous than the two largest Muslim denominations: Sunnis—who account for 85-90 percent of the Muslim world—and Shias. Today, the largest of these communities is in Oman, where they constitute the majority. It is also practiced to a lesser extent in Algeria (in Mzab), Tunisia (in Djerba), Libya (in Nafusa), and Tanzania (in Zanzibar). History Background The Ibadis began as a moderate branch of the Kharijites, an Islamic sect that split from the Muhakkima and al-Haruriyya. These groups initially supported Ali during the Firs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
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Endonym And Exonym
An endonym (also known as autonym ) is a common, name for a group of people, individual person, geographical place, language, or dialect, meaning that it is used inside a particular group or linguistic community to identify or designate themselves, their place of origin, or their language. An exonym (also known as xenonym ) is an established, ''non-native'' name for a group of people, individual person, geographical place, language, or dialect, meaning that it is used primarily outside the particular place inhabited by the group or linguistic community. Exonyms exist not only for historico-geographical reasons but also in consideration of difficulties when pronouncing foreign words, or from non-systematic attempts at transcribing into a different writing system. For instance, is the endonym for the country that is also known by the exonyms ''Germany'' and in English and Italian, respectively, and in Spanish and French, respectively, in Polish, and and in Finni ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
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Berber Latin Alphabet
The Berber Latin alphabet () is the version of the Latin alphabet used to write the Berber languages. It was adopted in the 19th century, using a variety of letters. History The Berber languages were originally written using the ancient ''Libyco-Berber'' script and then centuries later by the Tuareg Tifinagh script in Tuareg language areas, of which the Neo-Tifinagh alphabet/abjad is the modern development. The use of a Latin script for Berber has its roots in European (French and Italian) colonial expeditions to North Africa. Dictionaries and glossaries written with Latin letters, ordered alphabetically and following European orthography (mainly French) began to appear in print in the 19th century, they were intended to the colonial administration, traders and military officers. With the arrival of linguists specialized in Semitic languages there emerged a system based on Semitic romanization conventions: diacritics were used, and dictionary entries were now ordered by root. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
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Arabic Alphabet
The Arabic alphabet, or the Arabic abjad, is the Arabic script as specifically codified for writing the Arabic language. It is a unicase, unicameral script written from right-to-left in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters, of which most have contextual letterforms. Unlike the modern Latin alphabet, the script has no concept of letter case. The Arabic alphabet is an abjad, with only consonants required to be written (though the long vowels – ''ā ī ū'' – are also written, with letters used for consonants); due to its optional use of diacritics to notate vowels, it is considered an impure abjad. Letters The basic Arabic alphabet contains 28 letter (alphabet), letters. Forms using the Arabic script to write other languages added and removed letters: for example ⟨پ⟩ is often used to represent in adaptations of the Arabic script. Unlike Archaic Greek alphabets, Greek-derived alphabets, Arabic has no distinct letter case, upper and lower case letterforms. Many le ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
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M'zab
The M'zab, or Mzab (Mozabite language, Mozabite: ''Aghlan'', ), is a natural region of the northern Sahara Desert in Ghardaïa Province, Algeria. It is located south of Algiers and has approximately 360,000 inhabitants (2005 estimate). Geology The M'zab is a limestone plateau, centred on the Wadi, Wad M'zab (''Oued Mzab'') valley. History The Mozabite people, Mozabites ("Ath Mzab") are a branch of a large Berber people, Berber tribe, the Zenata, Iznaten, which lived in large areas of middle southern Algeria. Many Tifinagh letters and symbols are engraved around the Mzab Valley. After the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb, the Mozabites became Muslims of the Mu'tazili school. The indigenous Christian population persisted until the 11th century. After the fall of the Rustamid dynasty, Rustamid state, the Rustamid royal family with some of their citizens chose the Mzab Valley as their refuge. However, the Rostemids were Ibadi and sent a dawah, preacher (Abu Bakr an-Nafusi) who ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
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Mzab–Wargla Languages
The Mzab–Wargla languages or Northern Saharan oasis dialects are a dialect cluster of the Zenati languages, within the Northern Berber subbranch. They are spoken in scattered oases of Algeria and Morocco. Subclassification ;Kossmann (2013) Maarten Kossmann (2013) listed six "Northern Saharan oasis" dialects: * South Oranie and Figuig * Gurara * Tuwat- Tidikelt * Mzab * Wargla * Wad Righ (Tugurt) ;Ethnologue (2009) In ''Ethnologue'' XVI (2009), the "Mzab–Wargla" languages are listed as: * Tagargrent (Wargli) * Temacine Tamazight (Tugurt) * Taznatit ("Zenati": Gurara, Tuwat and South Oran) *Tumzabt ( Mozabite) Unlike Kossmann, ''Ethnologue'' considers the Berber dialect spoken in Tidikelt as a separate branch of the Zenati group, distinct from Tuwat. ;Blench Roger Blench (2006) listed eight varieties:Blench, Roger M. (2006"The Afro-Asiatic Languages: Classification and Reference List" Cambridge: Mallam Dendo. * Gurara * Mzab, Ghardaia (Mozabite) * Wargla * Tugurt * Segh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |