The Berber and the Berbers

Genetic and linguistic diversities

Jean-Michel Dugoujon

Clotilde Coudray

Antonio Torroni

Fulvio Cruciani

Rosaria Scozzari

Pedro Moral

Naima Louali

Maarten Kossmann

In Northern Africa, two main blocks of languages are spoken: the vernacular Arabic varieties and the Berber languages. Our objective is to correlate linguistic characters to genetic data. The precise language affiliation of the samples is controlled. Relationships with Arabic speakers are examined. Four informative genetic markers have been studied: two are autosomal (Gm allotypes and Alu sequences) and the other two are of maternal (mitochondrial DNA) and paternal (Y chromosome) lineages. Four populations were studied (514 samples): three are from Morocco (Asni, Bouhria and Figuig oasis) and the fourth from Egypt (the Siwa oasis). The results were compared with previously published analyses. The genetic differentiation between North-Western and North-Eastern African Berbers (Siwan) seems to be correlated with linguistic studies.

Published online: 17 December 2009
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.152.05ch4

Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Abdeli, Amine & Traki Benhassine

2019. Paternal lineage of the Berbers from Aurès in Algeria: estimate of their genetic variation. Annals of Human Biology 46:2 ► pp. 160 ff.

Arauna, Lara R & David Comas

2017. In eLS, ► pp. 1 ff.

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