Eastern Berber languages
Group of Berber languages spoken in Libya and Egypt
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Eastern Berber languages are a group of Berber languages spoken in Libya and Egypt. They include the Awjila, Sokna, Fezzan (El-Fogaha), Siwi, and Ghadamès languages,[1] though it is not clear that they form a valid genealogical group.
distributionLibya (Ghadames, Fezzan, Awjila, Sokna, Fuqaha, Tmassa), Egypt (Siwa and Qara)
- Berber
- Eastern Berber
Classification
Kossmann (1999:29, 33)[2] divides them into two groups:
- one consisting of Ghadamès and Awjila. These two languages are the only Berber languages to preserve proto-Berber *β as β;[3] 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[4] and the loss of *β[3]) 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.[5]
The "Lingvarium Project" (2005) cites two additional languages, both located in Libya: the extinct language of Jaghbub and the still-spoken Berber language of Tmessa, an oasis located in the north of the Murzuq District.[6] Blažek (1999) considers the language spoken in Tmessa as a dialect of Fezzan.[7]
