Kabyle Alphabet & Letters

Kabyle, called Taqbaylit by its speakers, is the Berber (Amazigh) language of Kabylie, the mountainous region east of Algiers around Tizi Ouzou (in Kabyle Tizi Wezzu), Béjaïa (Bgayet) and Bouira. It has been written in Latin letters since the 19th century, and the spelling most people use now goes back to the work of the writer and scholar Mouloud Mammeri, whose grammar of the language was written in Kabyle itself, and to later conventions worked out by Berber linguists, many of them at INALCO in Paris.

The alphabet here follows the CLDR standard: 34 letters, A a to Ẓ ẓ, in Kabyle order. Ten of them are not in the English alphabet: č ḍ ɛ ǧ ɣ ḥ ṛ ṣ ṭ ẓ. Each special letter sorts right after its plain partner (č after c, ḍ after d, ɛ after e, ǧ and ɣ after g), and dictionaries keep them apart, so words beginning with ɣ come after all the words in g. There is no o and no v: Kabyle has only three full vowels, a, i and u, plus the short neutral vowel written e, as in Taqbaylit and tanemmirt. P turns up mainly in borrowed words.

What the special Kabyle letters sound like

Some ordinary letters have a different value from English: c is always the sound of English sh, as in aqcic (boy) and taqcict (girl); x is a rough sound in the back of the throat like the ch of Scottish loch, as in axxam (house); q is a k made further back, deep in the throat; and j is the soft sound of French j. č (c with a caron) is English ch, as in ečč (eat) and učči (food), and ǧ is English j as in jam.

ɣ is a voiced sound at the back of the mouth, close to the French or German r and to Arabic ghayn; it is in aɣrum (bread) and in Imaziɣen, the name of the Amazigh people. ɛ writes the throaty sound of Arabic ʿayn, common in words shared with Arabic, such as lɛid (the Eid). ḥ is a breathy h pushed from the throat, as in ḥemmleɣ-k (I love you).

The dot below marks an emphatic consonant, said with the back of the tongue pulled toward the throat so the whole syllable sounds darker: ḍ ṭ ṣ ẓ ṛ. They are separate sounds, not decoration: aḍar (foot), aṭas (a lot), aẓru (stone). ḍ is especially frequent, because it ends every verb said to one person in the past: telliḍ (you were), as in Amek telliḍ? (how are you?).

Double letters, ţ and z̧, and how Kabyle sounds

Kabyle is famous among Berber languages for softening its stops: a single b, d, t, k or g between vowels is usually pronounced as a fricative, so a t sounds close to the th of thin and a d close to the th of this. The spelling does not mark this. Doubled letters, on the other hand, are written out because they change words: tt, dd, kk and gg are hard, long stops, as in aseggas (year).

Some Kabyle transcriptions use ţ (t with a cedilla) for ts and z̧ (z with a cedilla) for dz. Linguists sometimes add a raised ʷ to mark a rounded consonant such as gʷ, which everyday writing leaves out.

The hyphen is busy in Kabyle: it ties small pronoun and direction words to the word before them, as in fell-awen (on you, to you all), ḥemmleɣ-kem (I love you, said to a woman) and yis-wen (with you all). Quotations usually take the French guillemets « … », which Kabyle readers know from French, and sometimes the English “ … ”.

Kabyle in Tifinagh, and the symbol ⵣ

Kabyle is also written in Neo-Tifinagh, a modern form of the ancient Libyco-Berber script, spread from the late 1960s by the Académie berbère, a group founded in Paris largely by Kabyle activists. Tifinagh is used for signs, logos, book covers and slogans more than for long texts, which are mostly in Latin letters. The Tifinagh block entered Unicode in 2005; its letters, and the full alphabet of Standard Moroccan Tamazight, are in that collection.

The best-known Tifinagh letter is ⵣ, yaz, the sound z of Amaziɣ, the word for a Berber person, often explained as "free man". It stands in the middle of the Amazigh flag, red on blue, green and yellow stripes, and it is what many people paste when they look for a Kabyle symbol. Unicode has no emoji for the Amazigh flag or for any Kabyle flag, so people build one from ⵣ and the hearts 💙💚💛, or use the Algerian flag 🇩🇿.

How to type Kabyle letters on a keyboard and phone

The easiest way is a Kabyle or Tamazight (Latin) keyboard layout, which puts č ḍ ɛ ǧ ɣ ḥ ṛ ṣ ṭ ẓ on their own keys or behind a dead key; layouts exist for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iPhone, so look for Kabyle, Taqbaylit or Tamazight Latin in your keyboard settings or app store. Without one, copy the letters from this page.

In Microsoft Word, type the code and press Alt+X: 010D č, 1E0D ḍ, 025B ɛ, 01E7 ǧ, 0263 ɣ, 1E25 ḥ, 1E5B ṛ, 1E63 ṣ, 1E6D ṭ, 1E93 ẓ; for the capitals 010C Č, 1E0C Ḍ, 0190 Ɛ, 01E6 Ǧ, 0194 Ɣ, 1E24 Ḥ, 1E5A Ṛ, 1E62 Ṣ, 1E6C Ṭ, 1E92 Ẓ. On a Mac, the ABC Extended input source gives the caron with Option+V and the dot below with Option+X, each followed by the letter; ɛ and ɣ come from the Character Viewer (Control+Command+Space, search "open e" or "gamma"). In HTML write č for č and numeric references such as ḍ for ḍ, ɛ for ɛ and ɣ for ɣ.

Watch the look-alikes: ɛ and ɣ are Latin letters, not the Greek ε (epsilon) and γ (gamma). They look almost the same, but a Kabyle word typed with the Greek ones may not match searches or spell-checkers that expect the Latin letters. Writing ε or 3 for ɛ and gh for ɣ is common in quick messages, but it is not the standard spelling.

Where Kabyle is spoken

Kabyle is spoken mainly in Algeria 🇩🇿, in Kabylie and by Kabyle families in Algiers and other cities. Estimates of the number of speakers vary widely, from about 3 million native speakers in Algeria to several million more when the large community abroad is counted. A big part of that community lives in France 🇫🇷, especially in and around Paris, which is why Kabyle music, radio and books have long been produced there too, and why the euro, €, is as familiar to many Kabyle families as the Algerian dinar, written DA.

Tamazight, the family name for Kabyle and the other Berber languages, became a national language of Algeria in 2002 and an official language in 2016, and Yennayer, the Amazigh New Year on 12 January, has been a public holiday there since 2018. Close relatives with their own collections are Central Atlas Tamazight, Tachelhit, Riffian and Standard Moroccan Tamazight; Algerian Arabic is also widely spoken in the country, and the Algeria collection has the flag, food and other emoji of the whole country.