Berber orthography modern printed works is the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO) standard, designed for phonemicity. Older systems from the colonial French era are still found in place names and personal names. The older colonial system showed marked influence from French, for instance writing as and as , and was inconsistent in marking many Berber sounds, for instance writing as a circumflex over the vowel, and often leaving emphatics unmarked. The Tifinagh script is the traditional script for written Berber; but Latin Script remains the predominant orthography for Berber literature for the general public in North Africa. Some Tamazight
Northern Berber languages perfect. Northern Berber languages The Northern Berber languages are a dialect continuum spoken across the Maghreb, constituting a subgroup of the Berber branch of the Afroasiatic family. Their continuity has been broken by the spread of Arabic, and to a lesser extent by the Zenati group of Northern Berber. The Zenati idioms share certain innovations not found in the surrounding languages; notably a softening of "k" to "sh" and an absence of "a-" in certain words, such as "hand" ("afus" vs. "fus".) Northern Berber languages spoken by over a million people include Shilha, Central Morocco Tamazight, Riff, Shawiya and Kabyle.