Larbi

Tamazight Algeria

The Amazigh are one of the Indigenous peoples of North Africa. Their languages, referred to collectively as Tamazight, belong to the large Afro-Asiatic family which also includes Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew, as well as Ancient Egyptian, Hausa and many lesser-known languages of Chad, Ethiopia and surrounding areas. Tamazight languages have been written since at least 200 BCE using a unique script called Tifnagh. Tamazight has profoundly influenced the sound patterns and grammars of the Arabic dialects of Morocco and Algeria yet the languages have been suppressed to various degrees throughout North Africa. Even now, Tamazight speakers continue to fight for linguistic rights in their home countries as manyof the traditional Amazigh areas shift to Arabic monolingualism.

Larbi fled political and economic hardship in Algeria as a teenager where use and study of his Berber language was banned, and in one short generation moved from his father's subsistence farming, unchanged for generations, to the vastly different life of a software engineer in the United States.