Diatopic Variation in Kabyle Berber

The range of studies on diatopic variation in Berber that are not simply descriptive – of the comparative type, with the aim of carrying out a diachronic reconstruction – but which seek to analyze the variation in a formal framework seems, at first sight, limited. Two important factors have led to the lack of interest shown in diatopic variation in Berber: on the one hand, the myth of a “Berber language,” shared by all Berber speakers, and on the other hand the extreme geographical, cultural, and linguistic fragmentation between Berber-speaking communities. However, the geographical fragmentation of these “islands” as well as the absence of any political organization (there has never been a Berber state in the modern era), and, consequently, of any sense of common cultural identity between the different communities, has led to great variation and linguistic distance between different Berber languages. Not only is there no mutual intelligibility between, say, Kabyle and Tuareg, but speakers of different varieties of Kabyle (depending on their geographical distance) do not understand each other either. This situation means that the few researchers working on Berber (compared to those working on other language families) focus their efforts, first, on the study of macro-variation: we compare Kabyle, Zenaga, Tuareg, Tachelhit, Siwi, etc. This granularity makes it difficult to zoom in on a particular language such as Kabyle to analyze the diatopic variation within it. It is with this need in mind that this work analyzes diatopic variation in the formation of nominal singulars, and plurals, in Kabyle.