The Berbers or the Amazighs (Berber: ⵉⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⴻⵏ, Imazighen / Imaziɣen in plural, and Amazigh in singular) are the ethnicity indigenous to North Africa west of the Nile Valley. They are distributed from the Atlantic Ocean to the Siwa Oasis in Egypt, and from the Mediterranean Sea to the Niger River. Historically they spoke Berber languages, which together form the "Berber branch" of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Since the Muslim conquest of North Africa in the seventh century, a large portion of Berbers have spoken varieties of Maghrebi Arabic, either by choice or obligation[citation needed]. After the invasion of north Africa by France people were "not only forced to speak French but that access to every non-French language was forbidden as well. Especially in school, Algerians were forced to speak French instead of their previous mother tongues; this included classical Arabic, the Berber language and all of its dialects. Algerians were required to speak a single language, French".[5] Foreign languages like French and Spanish, inherited from former European colonial powers, are used by most educated Berbers in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia in some formal contexts such as higher education or business.
Today, most of the Berber people live in Northern African countries such as Algeria and Morocco; a large Berber population is also found in Tunisia,[6] Libya, Mauritania, Mali and Niger, as well as large migrant communities living in France, Turkey and other countries of Europe.[7][8]
The Berber identity is usually wider than language and ethnicity, and encompasses the entire history and geography of North Africa. Berbers are not an entirely homogeneous ethnicity and they encompass a range of phenotypes, societies and ancestries. The unifying forces for the Berber people may be their shared language, belonging to the Berber homeland, or a collective identification with the Berber heritage and history.
There are some twenty-five to thirty million Berber speakers in North Africa.[1] The number of ethnic Berbers (including non-Berber speakers) is far greater, as it is known that a large part of the Berbers have acquired other languages, over the course of many decades or centuries, and no longer speak Berber today.
Berbers call themselves some variant of the word i-Mazigh-en (singular: a-Mazigh), possibly meaning "free people" or "free and noble men".[7] The word has probably an ancient parallel in the Roman and Greek names for some of the Berbers, "Mazices".
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