Berber Latin Alphabet - Tifinagh Berber Alphabet and The Berber Latin Alphabet

Tifinagh Berber Alphabet and The Berber Latin Alphabet

The following table shows the Northern-Berber Latin alphabet with its Neo-Tifinagh and Arabic equivalents:

The Latin letter "O" does occur occasionally in Tuareg-Berber orthography. In Northern-Berber orthography it corresponds to the letter "U".

In the interest of pan-dialectal legibility, the Berber Latin alphabet omits the partly phonemic contrasts found in some Berber language varieties (notably the Kabyle language and Tarifit) between stops and fricatives.

Phonemic labiovelarization of consonants is widespread in Berber varieties, but there are rarely minimal pairs and it is unstable (e.g. ameqqʷran "large", in the Ainsi dialect of Kabyle, is pronounced ameqqran in At Yanni Kabyle-Berber, only a few kilometers away). The INALCO standard uses the diacritic < ° > for labiovelarization only when needed to distinguish words, e.g. ireggel vs. iregg°el.

The letter < ṛ > is used for only when it contrasts with < r > (e.g. ṛwiɣ "I am satisfied" vs. rwiɣ "I am moved"). In all other cases < r > is used, e.g. tarakna "carpet" (pronounced taṛakna). This is because is often an allophone of /r/ in the environment of other emphatics, and it rarely contrasts with /r/ otherwise. Exceptional cases of other emphatics, e.g. "hound", are ignored (i.e. written as uccay).