page_title: Berber languages
section_title: Population
hierarchical_section_title: Berber languages / Population
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of Berber speaking areas in Morocco
context_page_description: The Berber languages, also known as Berber or the Amazigh languages, are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They comprise a group of closely related languages spoken by the Berbers, who are indigenous to North Africa. The languages were traditionally written with the ancient Libyco-Berber script, which now exists in the form of Tifinagh.
  Berber is spoken by large populations of Morocco, Algeria and Libya, by smaller populations of Tunisia, northern Mali, western and northern Niger, northern Burkina Faso and Mauritania and in the Siwa Oasis of Egypt. Large Berber-speaking migrant communities, today numbering about 4 million, have been living in Western Europe, spanning over three generations, since the 1950s. The number of Berber people is much higher than the number of Berber speakers.
  Around 95% of the Berber-speaking population speak one of seven major varieties of Berber, each with at least 2 million speakers. They are, in order of number of speakers: Shilha, Kabyle, Central Atlas Tamazight, Riffian, Shawiya and Tuareg.
context_section_description: The exact population of Berber speakers is hard to ascertain, since most North African countries do not record language data in their censuses. Ethnologue provides a useful academic starting point; however, its bibliographic references are very inadequate, and it rates its own accuracy at only B-C for the area. Early colonial censuses may provide better documented figures for some countries; however, these are also very much out of date.
  Few census figures are available; all countries (Algeria and Morocco included) do not count Berber languages. The 1972 Niger census reported Tuareg, with other languages, at 127,000 speakers. Population shifts in location and number, effects of urbanization and education in other languages, etc., make estimates difficult. In 1952, André Basset (LLB.4) estimated the number of Berberophones at 5,500,000. Between 1968 and 1978 estimates ranged from eight to thirteen million (as reported by Galand, LELB 56, pp. 107, 123–25); Voegelin and Voegelin (1977, p. 297) call eight million a conservative estimate. In 2006, Salem Chaker estimated that the Berberophone populations of Kabylie and the three Moroccan groups numbered more than one million each; and that in Algeria, 9,650,000, or one out of five Algerians, speak a Berber language (Chaker 1984, pp. 8–9).
  Morocco: In 1952, André Basset ("La langue berbère", Handbook of African Languages, Part I, Oxford) estimated that a "small majority" of Morocco's population spoke Berber. The 1960 census claimed that 34 percent of Moroccans spoke Berber, including bi-, tri- and quadrilingual people. In 2000, Karl Prasse cited "more than a third" in an interview conducted by Brahim Karada at Tawalt.com. A 2007 estimate put the number of Amazigh speakers in Morocco at 7.5 million. According to Ethnologue (by deduction from its Moroccan Arabic figures), the Berber-speaking population should be estimated at 35 percent or around 10.5 million speakers. However, the figures it gives for individual languages only add up to 7.5 million, divided into three languages:
  Riffian: 3 million
  Shilha: 8 million
  Central Atlas Tamazight: 4–5 million
  A survey included in the official Moroccan census of 2004 and published by several Moroccan newspapers gave the following figures: 34 percent of people in rural regions spoke a Berber language and 21 percent in urban zones did; the national average would be 28.4 percent or 8.52 million. It is possible, however, that the survey asked for the language "used in daily life", which would result in figures lower than those of native speakers, as the language is not recognised for official purposes and many Berbers who live in a Darija-Arabic-speaking area cannot use Berber as a working language in some work environments like schools and administration; also, the use of Berber as a communication language in government institutions was usually frowned upon or even ridiculed as "peasant speech" until recent times which may have affected the results of the survey.
  Adding up the population (according to the official census of 2004) of the Berber-speaking regions as shown on a 1973 map from the CIA results in at least 10 million speakers, not counting the numerous Berber population which lives outside these regions in the bigger cities.
  Moroccan linguist Mohamed Chafik claims that 80 percent of Moroccans are Berbers. It is not clear, however, whether he means "speakers of Berber languages" or "people of Berber descent".
  The division of Moroccan Berber languages into three groups, as used by Ethnologue, is common in linguistic publications, but is significantly complicated by the presence of local differences: Shilha is subdivided into Shilha of the Draa River valley, Tasusit (the language of the Souss) and several other mountain languages. Moreover, linguistic boundaries are blurred, such that certain languages cannot accurately be described as either Central Morocco Tamazight (spoken in the central and eastern Atlas area) or Shilha.
  Algeria: In 1906, the total population speaking Berber languages in Algeria (excluding the thinly populated Saha
caption: Map of Berber-speaking areas in Morocco
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