Berberophone

The population of Kabylie is almost exclusively Berberophone.

Tuaregs are a Berberophone group.

Kabyles are a Berberophone group that lives in northeastern Algeria.

Algeria's Berberophone population

There are Berberophone pockets of some size in the more rugged regions, and a heavy infiltration of Berber in most rural speech, having to do particularly with the names of flora and fauna, tools and utensils, toponymy, and a special vocabulary fitted to the settled agriculture of the area.

Nearly half of the Moroccan population is Berberophone; i.e. they are monolingual Berbers, and the majority of them are bilingual because they also speak Dialectal Arabic.

Morocco is a special country because of the importance of the presence of → Berber. Over 40 percent of the population is Berberophone; this is an estimate because there are no official figures.

In the capital city Algiers, around half of the population is Berberophone.

The French, however, were unsuccessful in their attempt to exploit the Berber-Arab dichotomy. For this failure a French Berberologist blames General Lyautey: “. . . under the impulse of Lyautey, the French succeeded in accomplishing what the Sultan had attempted without success. This was the unification of arabophone and berberophone Morocco.[…]”

The Mzāb area is well-known as the home of a berberophone khāridjite community.

For historical and political reasons rooted in the history of Algeria and the political authority of the Moroccan Sultan, Jews (whether arabophone or berberophone) remained an intermediate ethnic group on the margins of the French preoccupation with the culture and identity of the Muslim population.

But while attempting to downplay the ‘racial’ or ethnic connotations that Arabisation seemed to some, already, to imply, the regime’s dominant line also implied that no distinctively Berber or berberophone culture could be considered legitimately part of an Algerian national patrimony.

Colonial analysts were shocked during the last part of the century to observe that in spite of all of their efforts to define and strengthen the Berber community, the number of berberophones was actually declining and that knowledge of Algerian Arabic was spreading rapidly.

Smaller groups of berberophones live in Tunisia (among others on the island of Djerba), Lybia (Jebel Nefousa and various Saharan towns) and Egypt (Siwa).

Berber speakers make up an estimated 25 per cent of Algeria’s population. Other major concentrations of berberophones are found in the Aurès mountains, in the Tassili/Ahaggar of the far south, and in the Mzab of the central Algerian pre-Sahara.