The Tribal Society

Zuwara Berber, also known as Twillult, is a Berber dialect spoken by the people of Zuwara, a coastal city in western Tripolitania, northwestern Libya. The language is part of the Zenati branch of the Berber languages, which belong to the Afro-Asiatic language family. Zuwara Berber is unique in that it is considered a dialect of the Nafusi language by Ethnologue, although some scholars, such as Kossmann (1999), classify it as a distinct branch of Berber due to differences in its linguistic features. The term “Twillult” refers to the local variety of the language, and the word “Mazigh” is often used to refer both to the broader Amazigh language group and…