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
Proto-Berber language has produced a comprehensive reconstruction of Proto-Berber morphology based on Tuareg. Additional work on the reconstruction of Proto-Berber morphology was done by Maarten Kossmann. Proto-Berber had no grammatical case. Its descendants developed a marked nominative that is still present in Northern Berber and Southern Berber/Tuareg. In some cases, Proto-Berber lost it thereafter, recently in Eastern Berber and Western Berber (Zenaga). The relics of the ancient morphological segments preserved in the modern varieties, in the Libyan inscriptions and in the ancient toponymical stratas show that the basis of word formation is a monosyllabic lexical unit (vc, cvc) whose vowels and consonants