Proto-Berber language reached the stage where these different branches of this language family evolved. From that perspective, Proto-Berber was the first Berber stage to depart from Proto-Afrosiatic in the eighth millennium. It was restructured several times during the almost 10,000 years that separated it from its modern shape, which has preserved few relics. Roger Blench (2018) suggests that Proto-Berber speakers experienced intense language leveling about 2,000 years ago as the Roman Empire was expanding in North Africa. Hence, although Berber had split off from Afroasiatic several thousand years ago, Proto-Berber itself can only be reconstructed to a period as late as 200
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