Essai sur la phonologie du proto-berbère

Berber languages and dialects are spoken in an area stretching from Egypt, Libya, Algeria to Morocco and from the Mediterranean coast to south of the Sahara. The area includes numerous large Arabic-speaking regions, yet speakers of the various Berber languages make up approximately 50% of the population in Morocco as well as about 25% in Algeria. Along with the Semitic, Egyptian, Cushitic, and Chadic languages, the Berber languages form one of the main branches of the Afro-Asiatic (formerly known as Hamito-Semitic) language family, the principal language family found in northern Africa and the Middle East. The Berber languages vary to a degree comparable with the various Germanic languages. However, the Afro-Asiatic languages differ from one another much more than, for example, the Indo-European languages. Thus there is only a limited possiblility of applying methods known from Indo-European linguistics to the task of reconstructing the respective Afro-Asiatic proto-languages. The term