LSASL 35: One Moroccan Amazigh/Berber Secret Language: the “sīn” Variety

One Moroccan Amazigh/Berber Secret Language: the “sīn” Variety

Nasser Berjaoui
Ibn Tofail University

This book (which is one among a series of future works on Moroccan Amazigh/Berber “secret languages”) is the first research project, to the best of our knowledge, that studies and provides a detailed description and analysis of one Amazigh/Berber “secret language” of the south-east of Morocco.

The present book contains ten chapters. These respectively propose the following: general backgrounds, the basic encoding procedures of individual words in the “secret language”, the secretizing of various speech parts, the manipulation of miscellaneous verbal forms, the changing of defined nouns, the distortion of multi-consonantal short speech parts, the encrypting of miscellaneous one-segmental words, the converting of syntactic structures, the manipulation of semantic aspects of the Tamazight, and the delivery rates of the messages in the “secret language”. Last, but not least, the study provides a detailed presentation of all the rules that govern the “secret language” in question. This language is called the “sin” variety, since it makes use of this consonant (the “s” consonant) in the secretization operations.

ISBN 9783862884711. LINCOM Studies in Afroasiatic Linguistics 35. 204pp. 2013.