Tifinagh

< Ge'ez/Ethiopic | Writing Systems | N'Ko >

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  1.   1.  Links to examples
  2.   2.  Fonts
  3.   3.  Utilities
  4.   4.  ISO-15924
  5.   5.  References & other links

Tifinagh (ⵜⵉⴼⵉⵏⴰⵖ) is an ancient writing system used historically, traditionally, and in many places contemporarily for Berber (Tamazight) languages - Tamasheq, Kabyle, Tarifit, etc. It derives from the ancient Phoenician script, via Old Libyan, the script used by the Numidian kingdom before the Roman invasion. It had dropped out of use in the north by the end of the Roman period, but has remained in continuous use in the Sahara, mainly by the Tuareg.

In the 1960s, Berber activists in the north (initially Kabyles) made efforts to revive Tifinagh there, with some success; their proposals shared three major differences from the Tuaregs' more traditional alphabet:

  • Direction of writing was LTR (Tuaregs mainly use RTL, TTB, and BTT)
  • All vowels were marked (Tuaregs mark no vowels, except occasionally word-finally)
  • Several letters were introduced for consonants found in northern dialects but not in Tuareg

Following the decision by the government of Morocco in 2003 to teach Tamazight (Tarifit, Tachelhit, and Middle Atlas Tamazight) in the Tifinagh script, a longstanding proposal to encode Tifinagh in Unicode was revived, completed to the level of permitting its use for most dialects, and approved. Tifinagh was added to the Unicode Standard in March, 2005 with the release of version 4.1.

1.  Links to examples

2.  Fonts

See the language profile for Berber, under 7.1.

3.  Utilities

4.  ISO-15924

CodeN°English NameNom françaisProperty Value AliasDate
Tfng120Tifinagh (Berber)tifinagh (berbère) 2006-06-21

Source: Codes for the representation of names of scripts / Codes pour la représentation des noms d’écritures, http://www.unicode.org/iso15924/iso15924-codes.html

5.  References & other links

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