Arab-Berber Arab-Berber Arab-Berbers (; ) are an ethnic group native to Maghreb, a North African region along the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Arab-Berbers are people of mixed Berber and Arab origin and whose native language is a variant of Maghrebi Arabic. Many Arab-Berbers identify primarily as Arab and secondarily as Berber. While some Arab-Berbers claim West Asian descent, genetic studies there have determined that Arab and non-Arab Berbers are genetically nearly identical. This suggest that the processes of "Arabization" in the Maghreb was probably mainly cultural rather than genetic. The Arab-Berber identity came into being as a direct result
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