Tifinagh is the alphabetic script used by the Tuareg, a Berber people of northern Africa, to write their language, Tamasheq or Tamashek. Before the 3rd century AD, Tifinagh was more widely used by speakers of Berber languages (or Tamazight) all across North Africa and on the Canary Islands. This older version of Tifinagh is sometimes named Libyan (French libyque) to distinguish it from the modern version used by the Tuareg. It dates from about the 6th century BC[1]. While ultimate Phoenician origin is widely accepted (for it as for most of the world's alphabets), it is clearly very innovative and may have more than one ancestor, "probably Punic and Northern Arabic scripts" according to O'Connor 112; some scholars (eg M. Cohen) consider its origin to be a question as yet unresolved[2]. Some scholars consider it to be autochthonous in origin. Mustafa A'ashi considers "tifinagh" to be a Berber word deriving from the two words itif + nnegh, meaning our invention in the Berber language; however, given that the singular is tafineq (of which tifinagh is the regular plural), the etymology more commonly given (eg by Karl Prasse ) relates to the Greek phoinikos "Phoenician". Mustafa A'ashi suggests that Tifinagh may be older than the Phoenician script, and that that might motivate translating "Tifinagh" as our invention. Other scholars argue that neither etymology is correct.

Traditionally, the script marks no vowels, except word-finally; however, various proposals to allow it to mark vowels have been made in recent times. In some areas, Arabic vowel diacritics are combined with Tifinagh characters to mark vowels. The letter forms vary significantly across the wide area where Tifinagh is used. The direction of writing varies; right-to-left is common, but the older "Libyan" inscriptions most commonly use the unusual orientation bottom-to-top. Occasionally the script has been used to write other neighboring languages, such as Tagdal Songhai.

A modern version, sometimes styled "Neo-Tifinagh", was put forward by the Académie Berbère in the 1960's; it is written left to right, marks vowels, and has been modified to better fit Northern Berber phonology. In a modified form, this script has recently (2003) been adopted for pedagogical purposes in Morocco.

Tifinagh will be encoded in the Unicode range U+2D30—U+2D7F, starting in version 4.1.0.

External links

• Aligourane free modern Touareg Tifinagh fonts
• http://www.ancientscripts.com/berber.html
• http://amazighworld.net/studies/articles/touareg_histoire.php
• http://ennedi.free.fr/tifin.htm
• http://www.mondeberbere.com/langue/tifinagh/tifinagh_origine.htm