Word Boundaries in the Writing System of Standard Amazigh: Challenges from Tarifit Facebook Users

The present chapter attempts to take a relatively unconventional path of comparison: The word spellings applied by the speakers of Tarifit (a Berber language spoken in Northern Morocco and generally passed on by oral tradition) within an ethnically homogeneous Facebook group (one could also speak of an ethno-group) are compared with the orthographic rules for word spelling found in a reference grammar of Standard Berber (or: Amazigh) conceived by Boukhris et al. (2008) (cf. the notes on the standard language and on the standardization of Berber in Morocco sections “Languages, Scripts and Writing Against the Background of the Standardization of Berber” and “The Word Spelling in Standard Amazigh According to Boukhris et al. (2008)”). The aim of the chapter is not an error-analytical examination of the posts and comments posted in the Facebook group, but rather a critical discussion of the rules of word spelling in nominal contexts established in Boukhris et al. (2008). Boukhris et al. (2008) claim to be the first grammar that does not deal with a specific variety or dialect of Berber, but one that is dedicated to the grammatical description of Standard Amazigh (SA). (In Morocco, Amazigh (or in the French spelling Amazighe; pronounced: [amaziG]) has become established as the term for the standard language of Berber; in this chapter, the spelling Amazigh is used, which can also be found in English publications. Even if this term is to be criticized on a linguistic level, because Amazigh is basically a personal designation for a male person belonging to the Berber people, there is actually already a proper designation for the Berber language that includes all varieties or languages, which, however, is not used by Moroccan Berberologists. Moroccan Berberologists do not use this term because it is also used as a name for one of the three Berber languages or varieties in Morocco (Tamazight); the term Amazigh will be used in this chapter in particular to refer to the standard language of Berber developed by the Institut Royal der la Culture Amazighe. The corpus studied consists exclusively of linguistic data from Tarifit, the language or variety of Berber spoken in northern Morocco. The term Tarifit thus always refers to the language found in the corpus, while Standard Amazigh (SA) refers to the standard language discussed in Boukhris et al. (2008).) To date, this is the only reference grammar of SA. It was published by the Institut Royal de la Culture Amazighe (IRCAM). More recent grammars of SA have not been published by IRCAM to date.