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 Egypt–Libya bo ...

and

Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediter ...

. They include Awjila, 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 Awjila. 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 Sokna is a small village located between Hønefoss and Krøderen in the municipality of Ringerike, in the county of Buskerud, Norway. Its population is 543. Location Sokna is located in the valley of Soknedalen, between the Sogna and Ver ...

(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 E ...

. * Siwa * Awjila *

† * Ghadamès *

Zurg Extraterrestrial supervillains Film characters introduced in 1999 Galactic emperors Toy Story characters ...

† 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 ...

and the still-spoken Berber language of Tmessa, an oasis located in the north of the

Murzuq District Murzuq ( ar, مرزق ''Murzuq'') is one of the districts of Libya. It is in the south of the country. Its capital is Murzuk. The city was occupied by the Ottoman Empire in 1578 and served as the capital of Fezzan off and on until the Ottomans ...

. Blažek (1999) considers the language spoken in Tmessa as a dialect of

Fezzan Fezzan ( , ; ber, ⴼⵣⵣⴰⵏ, Fezzan; ar, فزان, Fizzān; la, Phazania) is the southwestern region of modern Libya. It is largely desert, but broken by mountains, uplands, and dry river valleys (wadis) in the north, where oases enable ...

.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