The Amazigh/Berber Secret Language of the "wāw" / the "rā?"
Nasser Berjaoui
Ibn Tofail University
This book analyses one Amazigh/Berber “secret language” of the south-east of Morocco. This “secret language” is known as “the language of the ‘wāw’” (the “w” consonant language) and “the language of the ‘rā?’” (the “r” consonant language), among its users. This “language” works through the substitution of one consonant of the word by the consonant “w” and by the addition of a disguise item that starts with the “r” consonant, among other things. The present book involves eight descriptive and concise chapters that present a sketchy general background to the “secret language” and that investigate the encoding of the following Tamazight language aspects: single words, prefixless parts of speech, prefixed verbs, defined nouns, multi-segmental items (consonants and vowels), one-segmental forms (a consonant or a vowel), and syntactic structures.
ISBN 9783862886869. LINCOM Studies in Afroasiatic Linguistics 37. 108pp. 2016.