Ait Seghrouchen Berber, or Seghroucheni (Seghrusheni), is a Zenati

Berber Berber or Berbers may refer to: Ethnic group * Berbers, an ethnic group native to Northern Africa * Berber languages, a family of Afro-Asiatic languages Places * Berber, Sudan, a town on the Nile People with the surname * Ady Berber (1913–196 ...

language of the

Eastern Middle Atlas Berber Eastern Middle Atlas Berber is a cluster of Berber dialects spoken in the eastern and north-eastern parts of the Middle Atlas, in Morocco. These dialects are those of the tribes of Ait Seghrouchen, Ait Warayn, Marmoucha, Ait Alaham, Ait Youb an ...

cluster. It is spoken by the

Ait Seghrouchen The Ait Seghrouchen (Berber: ''Ayt Seɣruccen'') are a Berber tribe of east-central Morocco. They are divided into two geographically separated groups, one on the south side of the Middle Atlas and one on the north side of the High Atlas. They s ...

tribe inhabiting east-central

Morocco Morocco, officially the Kingdom of Morocco, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It has coastlines on the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and has land borders with Algeria to Algeria–Morocc ...

Classification

Ait Seghrouchen Berber is commonly classed as

Central Atlas Tamazight Central Atlas Tamazight or Atlasic (native name: ''Tamazight'' ; ) is a Berber languageCentral Atlas Tamazight may be referred to as either a Berber language or a Berber dialect. As Berber languages have some degree of mutual intelligibility, ...

. It is reported to be

mutually intelligible In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intellig ...

with the neighbouring Berber dialect of Ait Ayache. Genetically, however, it belongs to the Zenati subgroup of Northern Berber, rather than to the Atlas subgroup to which the rest of Central Atlas Tamazight belongs, and are therefore excluded by some sources from Central Atlas Tamazight. Ait Seghrouchen is part of the

cluster of Zenati dialects, which is spoken in the eastern

Middle Atlas The Middle Atlas (Amazigh: ⴰⵟⵍⴰⵚ ⴰⵏⴰⵎⵎⴰⵙ, ''Atlas Anammas'', Arabic: الأطلس المتوسط, ''al-Aṭlas al-Mutawassiṭ'') is a mountain range in Morocco. It is part of the Atlas mountain range, a mountainous regio ...

Phonology

Consonants

Ayt Seghrouchen is notable for having the

lateral fricative A lateral is a consonant in which the airstream proceeds along one or both of the sides of the tongue, but it is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth. An example of a lateral consonant is the English ''L'', as in ''L ...

as an

allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plos ...

of the sequence . /k, g/ are pronounced as stops, unlike the closely related Ayt Ayache dialect in which they are fricatives. In the table below, when consonants appear in pairs, the one on the left is voiceless.

Vowels

Ait Seghrouchen Berber has a typical phonemic three-vowel system, similarly to

Classical Arabic Classical Arabic or Quranic Arabic () is the standardized literary form of Arabic used from the 7th century and throughout the Middle Ages, most notably in Umayyad Caliphate, Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphate, Abbasid literary texts such as poetry, e ...

: These phonemes have numerous allophones, conditioned by the following environments: (# denotes word boundary, X denotes C_{��flat − −/sub>, C̣ denotes C_{flat/sub>, G denotes C, , and )

Phonetic Schwa

There is a predictable non-phonemic vowel inserted into consonant clusters, realized as before front consonants (e.g. ) and before back consonants (e.g. . These are some of the rules governing the occurrence of :

(# denotes word boundary, L denotes , H denotes )

Stress

Word stress

In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as i ...
is non-contrastive and predictable — it falls on the last vowel in a word (including schwa).

References

Bibliography

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Berber languages
Berbers in Morocco
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