Many linguists also include Ghadames, and sometimes Nafusi, as well as the language of El-Fogaha in the Fezzan (not mentioned in the Ethnologue.) Some linguists regard this as two separate subgroups.
Languages of the Berber branch of the Afro-Asiatic family are spoken by a substantial portion of the population in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia; by scattered groups elsewhere in North Africa; and along the southern fringes of the Sahara Desert in western Africa.
The Nubian alphabet was derived from that of the Coptic language.
Languages spoken farther to the south-east, including Maasai in Kenya, have long been called Nilo-Hamitic; recent investigations, however, appear to prove that these tongues have no direct relationship to languages of the Afro-Asiatic family, but are most closely related to the Nilotic languages.
Linguists and population geneticists alike have identified this culture as a probable period for the spread of an Afroasiatic language (ancestral to the modern Berberlanguages) to the area.
Berber groups are first mentioned in writing by the ancient Egyptians, who fought against the "Lebu" (Libyans) on their western borders, and in 945 BC were conquered by Lebu who founded the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty.
A second mixed army of Arabs and Berbers came in 712 under Ibn Nusayr himself, and are claimed to have formed approximately 66% of the Islamic population in Spain, and supposedly that is the reason why they helped the Umayyad caliph Abd ar-Rahman I in Spain, because his mother was a Berber woman.
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