Tifinagh Keyboard Online – Type Tamazight in ⵜⵉⴼⵉⵏⴰⵖ

This Tifinagh keyboard online (ⵜⵉⴼⵉⵏⴰⵖ) types Standard Moroccan Tamazight in the alphabet taught in Moroccan schools. Every key follows the IRCAM keyboard exactly as xkeyboard-config publishes it — the keyboard database shipped with Linux desktops, where the layout is listed as “Berber (Morocco, Tifinagh)”. Click the keys on screen or type on your own keyboard: each physical key produces the Tifinagh letter drawn on it here, so there is nothing to install and no system setting to change.

Why IRCAM Tifinagh? The Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture (IRCAM, ⴰⵙⵉⵏⴰⴳ ⴰⴳⵍⴷⴰⵏ ⵏ ⵜⵓⵙⵙⵏⴰ ⵜⴰⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⵜ) was founded in 2001, and in February 2003 Morocco adopted its standardised Tifinagh as the script for teaching Amazigh. IRCAM fixed one alphabet of 33 letters for the three main Moroccan varieties — Tarifit in the north, Central Atlas Tamazight in the middle of the country and Tashelhit in the south — so that a single spelling could serve all of them. The 2011 constitution made Tamazight an official language of Morocco alongside Arabic, and Tifinagh now appears on road signs, ministries and public buildings across the country.

Neo-Tifinagh and Tuareg Tifinagh. Tifinagh descends from the ancient Libyco-Berber script carved on rocks and monuments across North Africa. The Tuareg of the Sahara kept it in use for everyday writing, traditionally recording consonants and leaving most vowels to the reader. In the late 1960s the Berber Academy in Paris adapted the Tuareg letters into an alphabet for the northern Berber languages and added letters for the vowels; that alphabet is usually called Neo-Tifinagh. IRCAM's alphabet is a standardised form of the same tradition: vowels are written as full letters (ⴰ, ⵉ, ⵓ and the neutral vowel ⴻ) and every letter has one fixed shape. Tuareg Tifinagh, used for Tamasheq, has a different letter inventory and some different shapes, so this keyboard is the one for Moroccan Tamazight rather than for Tamasheq.

The labialization mark ⵯ. Two of the 33 letters, ⴳⵯ (gʷ) and ⴽⵯ (kʷ), are a consonant followed by the modifier ⵯ (U+2D6F), which marks the consonant as pronounced with rounded lips, as in ⴰⵙⴳⴳⵯⴰⵙ (asggʷas, “year”). Unicode encodes them that way rather than as separate characters, so type ⴳ or ⴽ and then the ⵯ key, which sits to the right of ⵃ where AZERTY has its ^ key. The emphatic consonants are on Shift of their plain partners: Shift+ⵣ gives ⵥ, Shift+ⵔ gives ⵕ, Shift+ⵜ gives ⵟ, Shift+ⵙ gives ⵚ and Shift+ⴷ gives ⴹ.

Built on AZERTY. French AZERTY is the usual computer keyboard in Morocco, and the IRCAM layout puts each Tifinagh letter on the AZERTY key of the Latin letter IRCAM transcribes it with: ⴰ on A, ⵣ on Z, ⴻ on E, ⵔ on R, ⵜ on T, ⵢ on Y, ⵓ on U, ⵉ on I, ⵇ on Q, ⵙ on S, ⴷ on D, ⴼ on F, ⴳ on G, ⵀ on H, ⵊ on J, ⴽ on K, ⵍ on L, ⵎ on M, ⵡ on W, ⵅ on X (transcribed x), ⵛ on C (transcribed c), ⴱ on B and ⵏ on N. The three letters with no Latin counterpart take the keys that were left: ⵄ (ɛ) on O, ⵃ (ḥ) on P and ⵖ (ɣ) on V. The digit row behaves as on a French keyboard — symbols unshifted, numbers with Shift — and AltGr gives brackets, @ and the euro sign.

Unicode and fonts. Tifinagh has had its own Unicode block, U+2D30–U+2D7F, since Unicode 4.1 in 2005, so the text you type here is ordinary Unicode that pastes correctly into email, documents, search engines and social media. This page loads the Noto Sans Tifinagh font, so the letters display even on a computer with no Tifinagh font installed; whoever receives your text needs a font that covers the block to see letters rather than empty boxes.

Everything you type stays in your browser — nothing is sent to a server. Copy your text with one click, save it as a UTF-8 .txt file, or practise with the Tifinagh speed test.