EDIT The Berber script Tifinagh is an ancient script that is still in use today in north Africa. It is used mainly by the women of the Tuareg, a Berber people of northern Africa to write in the Berber languages like Tamazight, Tamasheq and Amazigh. They use it to write notes and loveletters or to create decorational letterforms for recreation. For general uses, the Arabic script is preferred, but since September 2003 in some Moroccan primary schools the Tamazight language is written in a modified form of the »Neo-Tifinagh« version of the script created by the Académie Berbère in the 1960’s.

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EDIT Use Today, Tifinagh is written left to right in horizontal lines, although some older inscriptions are oriented bottom-to-top. Vowels used to be unmarked except in in a word-final position, but that is changing and sometimes vowel diacritics from the Arabic script are »borrowed«.

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EDIT History Tifinagh or »Berber« is a descendant of the Ancient Berber script that probably evolved from the Punic script about the 6th century BC. It pretty much disappeared after the 3rd century AD. There are still inscriptions from these times, but they can\'t be read because linguists can\'t relate them to any of the Berber dialects from today. Somehow, remnants of the scripts survived to become the modern form of Berber which is known to us as Tifinagh. The name is believed to mean »Phoenician/Punic letters« or to come from the Greek word »pínaks«, writing tablet.

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EDIT Tifinagh and Unicode In Unicode, 55 Tifinagh characters are encoded, but more exist and are being used. Also, the shapes of the Glyphs vary a lot due to the wide area of distribution of the script, and their representations as seen above are not binding.

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