- Official language in
- Morocco
- Script
- Tifinagh
Where it's spoken
Article 5 of Morocco's constitution says that Arabic is the official language of the State and that Tamazight likewise constitutes an official language of the State, being the common patrimony of all Moroccans without exception. It adds that an organic law is to define how this official character is put into effect and how the language is brought into teaching and the priority domains of public life.
A paper by researchers at the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture (IRCAM) says that Morocco has three main varieties of Amazigh according to geographic area: Tarifit in the North, Tamazight in the Center, and Tashelhit in the South.
Sources
Script & pronunciation
Omniglot says that Tifinagh became the official script for the Tamazight language in Morocco at the start of the twenty-first century. The IRCAM paper says the Amazigh language has had its own writing since ancient times, and that IRCAM adapted it at that time into a standard alphabetic system called Tifinaghe-IRCAM, made up of 27 consonants, 2 semi-consonants and 4 vowels, and written horizontally from left to right.
The app's cards show the Tifinagh text with a line in Latin letters beside it. For example, the greeting "Hello" is shown as ⴰⵣⵓⵍ with the Latin line Azul.
Sources
Grammar essentials
WALS gives a basic order of subject, object and verb of VSO, with the verb first, for the variety it labels Berber (Middle Atlas); this is the datapoint for that one variety, and the WALS page says no more about which dialect it is. In this app, the card for "Do you speak English?", ⵉⵙ ⴷⴰ ⵜⵙⴰⵡⴰⵍⴷ ⵜⴰⵏⴳⵍⵉⵣⵜ?, is, according to its note, a yes/no question opened by ⵉⵙ, with the verb before the object. The card for "I don't understand", ⵓⵔ ⵔⵎⵉⵙⵖ, is, according to its note, ⵓⵔ plus the negative perfective.
The IRCAM paper says that the Amazigh verb inflects in four aspects: aorist, perfective, negative perfective and imperfective. The note on the "Do you speak English?" card adds that the feminine singular form of the verb is unverified.