Many people think that Arabic is the only language spoken across North Africa—but that’s simply not true. Yes, Arabic is the dominant language in the region, constituting the primary official language of all six countries that make up North Africa, but Arabic was brought to the region through the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb in the 7th century. Prior to that, North African natives spoke a plethora of their own languages, known as the Berber languages—and plenty of Berber languages are still spoken by millions today. One major Berber language is Central Atlas Tamazight.
Central Atlas Tamazight, or more commonly, simply Tamazight, is still spoken by 4.7 million people today in Morocco, despite Arabic’s steady grip on the North African nation. Remarkably, as many as 40 to 45% of Tamazight speakers are monolingual, generally elderly people, children, and women, as Tamazight men often have to learn Arabic and perhaps French when they venture off to bigger Moroccan cities for work. Education is generally not offered in Tamazight, forcing speakers to rely on Arabic and French to make their way through school. Thus, Tamazight faces challenges in its continued vitality, but we here at TranslationServices.com are thrilled to announce our new Tamazight translation team to cater to this minority community.
How about checking out a free quote for our Tamazight translation services? Message us today requesting one!
Understanding Tamazight, an important indigenous language of Morocco
As the name Central Atlas Tamazight suggests, the language is spoken in the central regions of Morocco’s Atlas mountain range, specifically in the regions of Fès-Meknès, Béni Mellal-Khénifra, and Drâa-Tafilalet. More than one-third of Moroccans are estimated to speak a Berber language, with Tamazight speakers constituting 40 to 50% of them (Shilha and Riff account for most other Moroccan Berber speakers). Tamazight can be written in the Latin alphabet, Arabic script, or the native Tifinagh script, with the Tifinagh and Latin scripts most common.
Tamazight is related to Arabic, but only distantly. The default word order is verb-subject-object, in line with Classical Arabic, and a masculine–feminine grammatical gender dichotomy characterizes Tamazight nouns. Nouns in the language undergo inflection not only for gender but also for number and state, with the language featuring the “construct state” to indicate possession, like Arabic and Hebrew. Tamazight verbs are arguably even more complicated, with markers for tense, aspect, mode, voice, person, and affirmation or negation added to the stems of verbs—while this allows for significant nuance, it makes the language difficult to learn.
Our Tamazight translators are passionate and skilled.
We’re determined to bring you the best Tamazight translation services we possibly can. To ensure wide coverage of as many different varieties of Tamazight as possible, we’ve scoured the entire Atlas mountain range, recruiting experienced Tamazight translators from every corner of the region. The translators on our team have grown up speaking Tamazight and are proud to help people from all over Morocco—and the world—break down the language barrier between Tamazight speakers and the global community. We do this by offering translation services in both directions—to Tamazight and from Tamazight.
We’ve endeavored to make the scope of our Tamazight translation services as wide as possible. Whether you’re looking for translation services for business materials, such as a business plan, employment contract, white paper, financial report, or ad copy, or academic documents like journal articles, research papers, dissertations, research surveys, or grade-school-level educational materials, you can count on our Tamazight translation team. Perhaps you’re interested in literary translation or localization, allowing you to share traditional Tamazight stories with people from around the world or bringing new media, in the form of novels, poems, websites, games, apps, and more, to the Tamazight-speaking population—our team has the skills to help with that, too.
We’re your go-to team for Tamazight translation services, no matter what you need translated. To get started with your Tamazight translation journey, send us a message today!