Français – عربي – ⵜⴰⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⵜ – English
Translation: Ibrahim Ait Dami
North Africans in Antiquity—much like today—spoke several different languages. The Punics, Greeks, and Romans, who dominated the region at different times, generally sought to enrich rather than destroy: they promoted their own languages without eradicating the indigenous Amazigh language. Around the 3rd century CE, a new language derived from Latin even emerged in the region. This language, known in modern scholarship as African Romance, continued to be spoken for several centuries after the Arab conquests.
The indigenous peoples of North Africa spoke various Tamazight dialects, which the Romans called Libyc (often “Libyan”). Punic, the language of the ancient Carthaginian Empire, was also widespread. In the Roman period, urban populations adopted Latin and Roman customs. Romanization, however, was not complete: the inhabitants of North African cities such as Carthage and Cirta did not speak “pure” Latin, but blended it with their ancestral languages. Over time, a new language took shape—Latin in its roots, but with many borrowings from Tamazight and Punic.
Latin was the language of imperial administration and education, and it was also used for Christian worship, at least in the major cities. A young North African would therefore learn Latin at school, use it for administrative formalities, and speak it in church; but at home and with friends, he spoke a local, dialectal form of Latin. The smaller the town, the farther the local speech drifted from Classical Latin. Tamazight remained dominant in rural areas. In time, North African dialectal Latin became a language in its own right.
African Romance is often thought to have been quite close to Sardinian, a language still spoken today on the island of Sardinia. The cover image of this article is one of the oldest manuscripts written in Sardinian, arguably the closest thing we have to what a manuscript in African Romance might have looked like.
African Romance survived the 7th-century Arab conquests: it was still spoken in the 12th century along the Mediterranean coasts, and perhaps as late as the 15th century in some isolated inland regions. A number of words in Maghrebi Arabic (Darija) and in Tamazight, especially the names of the months, probably derive from African Romance. In African Romance, the Latin v was pronounced b, a habit that can still be heard today in Darija in certain words borrowed from European languages. The English Wikipedia page includes a table of Tamazight words thought to be of Romano-African origin.
