Berber music bands of musicians traveling from village to village, entertaining at weddings and other social events with their songs, tales and poetry. Most Berber music is of the village- and urban-folk musical variety. Berber music and culture is influenced by the Berber people's long-standing struggle to achieve basic language rights and identity recognition in modern North African societies, aside from aesthetics and style. Berber music is characterized by its use of folk oral traditions, as well as particular scales and rhythmic patterns, which include pentatonic music and African rhythms. All these elements are combined together to form one of the main
Matmata Berber Matmata Berber Matmata Berber is a Zenati Berber dialect spoken around the town of Matmâta in southern Tunisia, and in the villages of Taoujjout, Tamezret and Zrawa. According to Ben Mamou's lexicon, its speakers call it "Tmaziɣṯ" or "Eddwi nna", meaning "our speech", while it is called "Shelha" or "Jbali" (جبالي) in local Tunisian Arabic dialects. The total population speaking this variety was estimated at 3,726 in 1975. Documentation of Matmata Berber is limited. A collection of fairy tales in this variety was published by Stumme in 1900. Basset (1950) provides a few dialect maps of Tunisian Berber including this