Starting today, Tlaxcala, the network of activists in favor of linguistic diversity, is adding a fourteenth language to its linguistic palette: Amazigh (Berber) or, as those who speak it refer to it: Tamazight.

Amazigh, the autochthonous language of North Africa for many thousands of years, moves today from the oral and traditional world, to the era of writing and modernity.

Despite the diversity of its dialects, those who speak Amazigh are able to understand one another

more or less, and communicate in their language.

Furthermore, since the first years of their struggle for official recognition in the 1940’s, the promoters of Tamazight were conscious of their common roots and aspired to a unified language in the form of a standard “normalized” language that all who spoke it might be able to read and understand, there where they live.

At the Tlaxcala web site, where the objective is the promotion of linguistic diversity, the Amazigh language will find a refuge that will allow it to develop itself.  Even if there is still no unified, normalized standard for Tamazight, Tlaxcala’s virtual space offers a place for all Amazighophones, regardless of their regional variances, so that they might write and translate in their own language.

At Tlaxcala it is also our wish to carry out a cooperative work that seeks to bring different dialects together, with the aim of establishing a standard comprehensible language for the larger part of Amazighophones in the word.

• If you wish to learn more about this language, read Tlaxcala opens its doors to the Amazigh (Berber) language, by Omar Mouffok