Tifinagh (Berber)

African

script: Tfng

family: African

type: abjad

whitespace: between words

open_type_tag: tfng

complex_positioning: no

unicode: true

diacritics: true

contextual_forms: true

status: Current

baseline: bottom

ligatures: optional

direction: ltr

The Tifinagh alphabet is used to write the Berber languages spoken in North Africa; it is believed to be a form of the Ancient Berber script. It is widely used by the Tuareg, the principal inhabitants of the Saharan interior.

There are many regional variations of the script; the standardised version proposed by the Institut Royal de la Culture Amazighe (IRCAM) consists of 33 symbols. This character set does not represent the full phonemic inventory of any particular language, but was proposed with a view to progressively unifiying regional phonological variations in the orthography. Consonant gemination is represented by writing the letter twice. Traditionally, vowels are only written word-finally, although in some areas Arabic diacritics are adopted to represent word-internal vowels. Some Tuareg orthographies use diacritics from the \\\Combining Diacritics\\\" Unicode block. Some texts also employ a number of conjunct forms in order to differentiate between words which would otherwise be ambiguous due to the vowels being unwritten. Historically