The Northern Berber languages are a dialect continuum across the Maghreb that form a sub-family within the Berber languages. Their continuity is broken by the spread of Arabic, and to a lesser extent by the Zenati subgroup, which, though unmistakeably Northern Berber, shares certain innovations not found in the surrounding languages, notably a softening of k to sh or ch, and an absence of a- in certain words, such as "hand" (afus vs. fus.) They include:
The eastern boundaries of the group seem to be controversial; some sources include the Nafusi language and the Ghadames language, while others do not. Most sources agree in regarding Ghadames language as outside of Northern Berber, but the Ethnologue does not.
There is no authoritative answer to the question of which of these to describe as a "language" versus a "dialect"; some academics have seen not only Northern Berber but all the Berber languages as dialects of a single language, while others come up with much higher counts. At any rate, mutual comprehensibility among Northern Berber languages is high, though not perfect.
Languages in the Mande subgroup are spoken in Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Bambara, spoken in Mali, is the principal language in this subgroup.
Languages of the Adamawa East subgroup are spoken in Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), and the Central African Republic.
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.
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