This page brings together basic information about the Tifinagh script, in particular the so-called Neo-Tifinagh writing system, and its use for the Standard Moroccan Tamazight and other Northern Berber languages. It aims to provide a brief, descriptive summary of the modern, printed orthography and typographic features, and to advise how to write Neo-Tifinagh using Unicode.
Sample
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The Tifinagh alphabet is used to write the Berber languages of North Africa. It use has been promoted with royal support in Morocco, where it is taught in elementary schools and used in publications. It is also widely used by the Tuareg, the principal inhabitants of the Saharan interior, and is also used in Algeria, Mali and Niger, although alongside the Latin or Arabic alphabets.
A modern alphabetical derivative of the traditional script, known as Neo-Tifinagh, was introduced in the 20th century by the Institut Royal de la Culture Amazighe (IRCAM) .
There are many regional variations of the script and the standardised version proposed by IRCAM doesn't represent the full phonemic inventory of any particular language, but was proposed with a view to progressively unifying regional phonological variations in the orthography. It has officially been the only writing system for transcribing the Tamazight language in Morocco since 2003.
Standard Moroccan Tamazight is an ongoing project to create a standardized national Moroccan variety of Berber by combining the three major Moroccan Berber languages (Shilha/Tashelhiyt, Central Atlas Tamazight and Riffian/Tarifit). No-one speaks Standard Tamazight natively and it must be learned in school.
The Neo-tifinagh orthography is an alphabet, ie. both consonants and vowels are indicated in a straighforward way, and geminated consonants are simply indicated by repeating the consonant. (The Tuareg use Tifinagh also, but as an abjad.) See the table to the right for a brief overview of features for the modern Tamazight orthography.
Text runs from left to right for Tamazight (but Tuareg text runs right-to-left, and ancient Tifinagh symbols were sometimes written vertically, running from bottom to top).
Words are separated by spaces.
The script is monocameral.
It has 27 basic consonant letters and 8 additional letters in the extended set. The modifier letter ⵯ [U+2D6F TIFINAGH MODIFIER LETTER LABIALIZATION MARK] is used to create 5 labialised velar sounds (3 of which use the extended letters). The extended set also recognises 4 digraphs, each representing a single sound, which may be rendered as ligatures
There are 4 vowel letters.
Other and older orthographies of Tifinagh, such as Tuareg orthographies, include a single vowel character, whose sound is determined by the preceding consonant. In other uses, diacritics are used to indicate vowels. They may also use conjunct forms to differentiate words that would otherwise be ambiguous.
Click on the sounds to reveal locations in this document where they are mentioned.
Phones in a lighter colour are non-native or allophones.
Vowel sounds
Plain vowels
Diphthongs
An epenthetic schwa is found in certain consonant clusters. Wikipedia has a table indicating typical contexts for Central Atlas Tamazight.wcat,#Vowels
The same article also has a table showing typical phonetic renderings of the 3 phonemes, according to context.
Consonant sounds
labial
dental
alveolar
post-
alveolar
palatal
velar
uvular
pharyngeal
glottal
stop
pb
td tˁdˁ
cɟ
kɡ
qɢ qʷ
affricate
fricative
β fv
θð ðˁ
sz sˁzˁ
ʃʒ
ʝ
xɣ
χʁ
ħʕ
h
nasal
m
n
approximant
w
lɫ
j
trill/flap
rrˁ
Vowels
Vowel sounds to characters
This section maps Tamazight vowel sounds to common graphemes in the Neo-Tifinagh orthography. Click on a grapheme to find other mentions on this page (links appear at the bottom of the page). Click on the character name to see examples and for detailed descriptions of the character(s) shown.
Neo-Tifinagh is designed to show vowels (and therefore, alphabetic), however, other writing sytems such as Touareg and older variants are not.
The ancient Berber script used a single vowel symbol, read normally as a, but i after y, and u after w.u Some Tuareg orthographies display a single vowel letter at the end of a word.
The vowel letters of Neo-Tifinagh are:ws
ⵉ␣ⵓ␣ⴻ␣ⴰ
Vowels in other orthographies
The Unicode block has two further vowel letters, used for Tuareg. ap
ⵦ␣ⵧ
Consonants
Consonant sounds to characters
This section maps Tamazight consonant sounds to common graphemes in the Neo-Tifinagh orthography. Click on a grapheme to find other mentions on this page (links appear at the bottom of the page). Click on the character name to see examples and for detailed descriptions of the character(s) shown.
Sounds listed as 'infrequent' are those listed by IRCAM as extended phones, used for historical or foreign sounds.
IRCAM defines the following set of characters for Neo-Tifinagh, which is a subset of the Unicode Tifinagh block designed to cater for Tarifit, Tamazight, and Tachelhit languages.ws
The extended IRCAM list includes 3 additional labioverlarised consonants, written as digraphs:
ⵅⵯ␣ⵇⵯ␣ⵖⵯ
Extended repertoire
The following letters are listed by IRCAM for use with 'extended' sounds. The first 6 are rotated versions of other characters. The last two are to represent foreign sounds.pa,30
ⵒ␣ⴲ␣ⵠ␣ⵝ␣ⴸ␣ⴺ␣ⴴ␣ⴿ
IRCAM's extended list also recognises 4 affricate sounds, which are commonly written using digraphs.pa,30
ⵜⵙ␣ⴷⵣ␣ⵜⵛ␣ⴷⵊ
In some fonts, these digraphs may be rendered using ligated forms. See also biconsonants.
Other consonants
The remaining consonants in the Unicode Tifinagh block are mostly used for modern Tuareg, but there are four others.
ⴾ␣ⵈ␣ⵞ␣ⴵ␣ⴶ␣ⵤ␣ⵋ␣ⵌ␣ⵆ␣ⵗ␣ⵘ␣ⵁ␣ⵂ␣ⵐ␣ⵑ
There is a significant amount of variation in the use of Tifinagh symbols between different regions.
A useful exploration of the differences ae.
Consonant clusters
Tamazight text written in Neo-Tifinagh typically displays consonants with no intervening vowels by simply putting them side by side, eg. ⵡⴰⴷⴷⴰⴷwaddad
Clusters in Tuareg
Consonant clusters may, however, be displayed as ligated forms in Tuareg.u This is particularly useful in text that is not fully vowelled. There are two ways to achieve this in Unicode-encoded text.
⵿
When a bi-consonant is considered obligatory, ⵿ [U+2D7F TIFINAGH CONSONANT JOINER] is added between the two consonants. If the font supports bi-consonant shapes, the joiner is not shown, but the consonants are ligated. If the font doesn't support the joiner, it should be displayed visually, eg. ⵎ⵿ⵜ
The second approach uses [U+200C ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER] rather than the Tifinagh joiner, and serves as an optional hint to the font. The fallback is simply the two consonants side by side.
The ligated shapes may vary from font to font.
The ligated biconsonants shown above, rendered using two different fonts (top, Tagmukay; bottom, Noto Sans Tifinagh).
Old Tifinagh texts don't show gemination.
Diacritics
̇␣̉␣̂␣̄
Diacritic marks from other blocks have been used in some notations, to represent vowels and foreign consonants, eg. ⴵ̇aⵉ̉iːⴱ̂p
When two diacritics are shown above the base, they may be dispayed side by side rather than stacked,u eg. ⵉ̇̄eː
Numbers
Tifinagh uses ASCII digits.
Text direction
The Neo-Tifinagh writing system is written horizontally, and left-to-right.
Modern Tuareg is written horizontally also, but right-to-left,s and reverses the glyphs of the characters, eg. ⴰⵙⵉⴹⵢⴰⵙ⵰ would be written ⴰⵙⵉⴹⵢⴰⵙ⵰This is not possible in plain text, and is achieved here by applying a CSS transform.
Early inscriptions of Tifinagh were written vertically, bottom-to-top, as well as horizontally left-to-right and right-to-left. Sometimes boustrophedon was used.
This section brings together information about the following topics:
writing styles;
cursive text;
context-based shaping;
context-based positioning;
baselines, line height, etc.;
font styles;
case & other character transforms.
The orthography has no case distinction, and no special transforms are needed to convert between characters.
Context-based shaping & positioning
In standard modern Tamazight there is very little contextual shaping, however when ⵍ [U+2D4D TIFINAGH LETTER YAL] or ⵏ [U+2D4F TIFINAGH LETTER YAN] are doubled, or appear next to each other, the second glyph is angled to the left in order to make the difference clear.u
Examples of leaning shapes.
This is purely a font-based feature. The character codes remain the same.
Another example of context-based glyph changes is the use of Tuareg bi-consonant conjuncts described earlier.
Context-based positioning doesn't occur in standard Tamazight, since there are no combining diacritics.
When special notations combined multiple diacritics above consonants to represent vowels, however, the diacritics are presented side by side, rather than stacked.
Side by side rendering of diacritics to represent vowels in special notations.
Font styling & weight
tbd
Graphemes
Grapheme clusters
tbd
Punctuation & inline features
Word boundaries
In Neo-Tifinagh, words are separated by spaces. Other variants often don't.
Phrase & section boundaries
,␣;␣:␣.␣?␣!
Tifinagh uses western punctuation.u
phrase
, [U+002C COMMA]
; [U+003B SEMICOLON]
: [U+003A COLON]
sentence
. [U+002E FULL STOP]
? [U+003F QUESTION MARK]
! [U+0021 EXCLAMATION MARK]
In some areas (such as Niger, Mali, Algeria pcs) ⵰ [U+2D70 TIFINAGH SEPARATOR MARK] (tazarast) is used for phrase and sentence breaks.s In right to left text, this character should be mirrored, however this isn't currently possible in Unicode.
Bracketed text
(␣)
Tamazight commonly uses ASCII parentheses to insert parenthetical information into text.
start
end
standard
( [U+0028 LEFT PARENTHESIS]
) [U+0029 RIGHT PARENTHESIS]
Quotations & citations
«␣»␣„␣”
Tamazight texts use guillemets and quotation marks around quotations.
This section looks at ways in which spacing is applied between characters over and above that which is introduced during justification.
Baselines, line height, etc.
tbd
Tamazight uses the so-called 'alphabetic' baseline, which is the same as for Latin and many other scripts.
Counters, lists, etc.
tbd
Styling initials
tbd
Page & book layout
This section is for any features that are specific to Tifinagh and that relate to the following topics:
general page layout & progression;
grids & tables;
notes, footnotes, etc;
forms & user interaction;
page numbering, running headers, etc.
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