Talk:African Romance

fascinating

What a fascinating little article. I would love to know more about the sources through which the existence of this language (or languages) is known. Cynwolfe (talk) 16:59, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

There must be more, but , . Seems better attested than British Romance. Dougweller (talk) 11:44, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Colonisation began earlier, with C. Gracchus and there were Etruscans from Caere at the time as documented by inscriptions.Aldrasto11 (talk) 14:05, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

The Alan Rushworth quote

Where the hell does that come from? It's not properly sourced and cited. I've searched for someone under that name and there's an archaeologist who's contributed to a short publication on Roman presence in Africa but WRT the quote it's not clear exactly where it comes from and what the evidence for it is. 82.4.129.255 (talk) 06:03, 6 January 2016 (UTC) The addition of that section was made on 23 June 2014. 82.4.129.255 (talk) 06:19, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

I did some digging, and it comes from p. 94 of Vandals, Romans and Berbers: New Perspectives on Late Antique North Africa, with Rushworth writing a chapter. He quotes six further sources to support his claim. Zugraga ^talk 15:48, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

Paul Wexler

Paul Wexler is a highly controversial, WP:FRINGE scholar. He suggests highly improbable origins for all the Jewish languages he works on and these are absolutely not accepted by linguists. He includes racial material in his claims: converted Khazars speaking Sorbian (!) relexified it into a German-appearing language. Modern Hebrew is a Slavic language. Berber converts are the ethnic origin of Sefardim. He has also had his work revoked for submitting papers under a pseudonym criticising his own critics. NOT A RELIABLE SOURCE. Ogress 18:32, 22 May 2016 (UTC)

@Ogress: FYI all IPs/accounts adding those stuffs were user:brunodam's sockpuppets. --Vituzzu (talk) 16:38, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

I removed all references to Wrexler, vide WP:FRINGE scholar. Zugraga ^talk 15:49, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

Expansion

I expanded the article, using as many attested, scholarly sources as possible (and funnily enough across a plurality of languages). I could not find:

• The verified Lausberg source on Sardinian being proposed to be as the sole living representative of southern Romance - left this with a citation needed, as it is probably my overlooking some paragraph or other
• I removed the claim that agursel in Berber derived from agaricellus in Latin. I could only find this on wikipedia, or websites copying wikipedia
• I removed references to couplets, as I could not find these in scholarly work

Zugraga ^talk 19:19, 30 May 2020 (UTC)

It is very good to be demanding on the sources. It is customary to be very light on sources, especially sources constructing the history of Islam.

If you now look for sources of witnesses on the Muslim/Arab conquests of North Africa, you will not find any. It seems that this story is only based on gossip beginning in the 9th century and improving in the following centuries.

I damn myself what would be the studies on the origin of Latin if we eliminate a story, the Arab conquests, which has less historical reality than the tales of the thousand and one nights.

THE ARABS HAVE NEVER INVADED SPAIN, IGNACIO OLAGUE’S REVENGE Adbouz (talk) 10:45, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

Added Tamazight Vocabulary Entries/question on syntax entry in Sardinian Wiki

Hello, just letting everyone know that I added several Tamazight/Berber vocabulary items into the chart, including 'afullus' (chicken), 'tafirast' (pear tree) and 'angalus', as well as a detail from Sardinian Language Wikipedia on the shared name of the Milky Way between Sardinian and Tamazight. Please review the edits if you wish.

I do have a question regarding a curious detail I noticed on the syntax section on the Sardinian Language Wikipedia page; it states that Sardinian's feature of using expressions with "to want" to express deontic modality--e.g, "the money has to be paid back" is literally "the money wants to be paid back (su dinare bolet/cherret torradu)--is also shared amongst Sicilian, Morrocan Berber and Morrocan Arabic. Is this purely coincidental, or could this possibly be evidence of a Southern Mediterranean 'Sprachbund'? Is this something to make note of in discussion of African Romance?

Some other questions: regarding the entry on the etymology of 'Rif' in Morocco, is this unquestionably from Latin ripa? I know that a source is listed, but I haven't found a reference to this anywhere else. Secondly, is 'Berber' still the acceptable term for the people, or is Amazigh/Tamazight considered more appropriate? Iotacist (talk) 18:36, 9 July 2022 (UTC) Iotacist

Berbers doesn't mean modern Amazigh ethnic group

The term Berber functioned historically as a geographic catch-all category used by external rulers, administrators, and chroniclers to refer to any population residing west of the Nile. It did not designate the modern Amazigh ethnic group, nor did it imply a shared language, specific cultural identity, or common genetic ancestry. Instead, this label conflated highly diverse groups, including urban coastal residents, inland sedentary farmers, and southwestern desert nomads, into a single blanket classification. Contrary to modern Berberist nationalist assertions, North Africa as a whole was never a homogeneous Amazigh territory, and the historical application of this catch-all phrase has obscured a highly complex, fragmented landscape of distinct peoples with completely different origins and languages. Prior to the structural and linguistic shifts of the High Middle Ages, the total population of the Maghreb was at a maximum 3 million people. The vast majority of this population was heavily concentrated in the fertile coastal strips, river valleys, and agricultural plains of northern Morocco, northern Algeria, Tunisia, and western Libya. This northern and eastern landscape was characterized by profound regional and historical divisions that predated the Islamic era. Eastern Libya, known as Cyrenaica, had been a deeply integrated Greek colony since antiquity and stood as a complete exception in North Africa due to the absolute absence of the ancient Libyco-Berber script. In contrast, the regions stretching from western Libya through Tunisia, northern Algeria, and northern Morocco did utilize various regional alphabets. However, the presence of the Libyco-Berber script across these specific territories does not imply an Amazigh origin. This writing system developed following the prehistoric arrival of Levantine pastoralists who entered the African continent through the Sinai Peninsula, bringing foundational Afroasiatic cultural and linguistic elements that gradually spread westward. The resulting script was not a single unified writing system created by Amazigh populations, nor was it used exclusively to write an Amazigh language. Instead, it existed in dozens of highly distinct regional variants and graphic families used by entirely different groups speaking separate languages. While the Eastern variant used in ancient Numidia was partially decrypted using Punic bilingual monumental stones, the extensive Western variants stretching across Algeria and Morocco to the Atlantic remain largely undeciphered, structurally highlighting an ancient landscape of deep linguistic fragmentation. Demographically, historical studies estimate that the populations residing west of the Nile before the high medieval period can be divided into two primary blocks, though these figures serve as demographic approximations rather than definitive counts. The first block consisted of the Afariq, or African Romans, who made up the absolute bulk of the population, sitting at an estimated 70% of the total, or approximately 2.1 million people. This dominant demographic layer consisted of a deeply rooted Roman, Mediterranean, and Punico-Phoenician stock. For over a millennium, they occupied the fertile northern bands and agricultural valleys, speaking African Romance derived from Latin due to centuries of Roman colonization and the widespread embrace of Christianity. The second block, comprising the remaining 30% of the population, or roughly 900,000 people, consisted of various independent Afro-Asiatic linguistic groups. These communities were highly fragmented and scattered across different corridors of the continent, each speaking its own distinct regional tongue. Among this diverse collection of Afro-Asiatic languages, the proto-Amazigh branch proved to be the most historically successful, ultimately becoming the single branch that survives into the modern era while the other neighboring Afro-Asiatic tongues were completely absorbed over time. The true linguistic homeland and center of gravity of this successful proto-Northern Amazigh language was located exclusively in the far southwestern corner of the Maghreb, specifically the Sus valley, the Anti-Atlas mountains, and the Presaharan fringes of modern southwestern Morocco. This unique ecological zone acted as an isolated refuge completely outside the historical sphere of Greek, Phoenician, Carthaginian, and Roman administrative or cultural influence, which allowed a distinct Afroasiatic structure to solidify independently from the rest of the continent. The structural and grammatical architecture shared by modern Amazigh speakers is a historically recent phenomenon with a shallow linguistic depth, fragmenting into its current regional branches only during the Middle Ages. Following the seventh-century conquests, the massive northern and eastern Afariq population embraced Islam and subsequently abandoned the Latin and African Romance languages they had acquired under Rome. Because they shared the same urban centers, fertile valleys, and agricultural spaces as the hundreds of thousands of arriving Arab settlers, a profound demographic and cultural mixing occurred. This assimilation process was drastically accelerated during the eleventh century with the massive migrations of the Banu Hilal, Banu Sulaym, and other Bedouin tribes who entered the central and western Maghreb from Egypt. Unlike the earlier urban-centric Arab military settlements, this massive, continuous influx of nomadic Arab clans penetrated deep into the agricultural rural plains of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Due to this intense rural intermixing, the northern Afariq groups rapidly Arabized, transitioning directly from African Romance to Arabic dialects without ever adopting or passing through an intermediate Amazigh linguistic phase. These thoroughly mixed, bilingual, and ultimately Arabized populations formed the actual bulk of the people historically referred to as Berbers in regional medieval chronicles, represented by major native dynasties such as the Zirids, who operated entirely within the Arabic-speaking and Islamic cultural sphere rather than an Amazigh one. The eventual expansion of the southwestern Amazigh language across other parts of North Africa was driven by economic and political shifts during the High Middle Ages. It began with the opening and expansion of the trans-Saharan trade routes in the ninth and tenth centuries, where southwestern pastoralists controlled the key desert nodes and oasis networks. This economic dominance made their local speech the indispensable lingua franca for the entire continental caravan network, causing inland groups to adopt it for commercial utility. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Almoravids and Almohads, who emerged from these proto-Amazigh groups, established political control over the Maghreb. Their rule elevated the social prestige of their language across the territories they supervised. These ruling proto-Amazigh dynasties established an administrative and military elite that governed these countries, a political structure later mirrored by subsequent successor states like the Hafsids in Ifriqiya. To maintain territorial control, these empires stationed permanent military garrisons in strategic northern strongholds and mountain chains. Over generations, these isolated military outposts transformed into the highly fragmented pockets of Amazigh speakers found today in regions like the Rif or the Kabylie mountains. The connection to ancient Phoenician influence was preserved even within this southwestern linguistic branch; the very name *Tifinagh*, the script preserved by the Saharan Tuareg branch of the language family, is a direct linguistic adaptation meaning Phoenician letters or characters. Consequently, these modern linguistic pockets do not represent the remnants of an ancient, continental prehistoric population, but are instead late medieval enclaves formed around historical garrisons and elite networks.

~2026-35103-41 (talk) 08:29, 15 June 2026 (UTC)