The Berber Latin alphabet (Berber: Agemmay Amaziɣ Alatin) is the version of the Latin alphabet used to write the Berber languages. It was adopted in the 19th century, using varieties of letters. Today, the Latin alphabet is preferred by most Berber writers and linguists in North Africa and abroad for practical reasons.
The Berber languages were originally transcribed using the ancient Libyco-Berber script, of which the Neo-Tifinagh alphabet is the modern representative.
The use of a Latin script for Berber has its roots in French colonialist expeditions to North Africa. Berber texts written with Latin letters began to appear in print in the 19th century when French, Italian, and Spanish colonial expeditionaries and military officers began surveying North Africa. The French attempted to use Romanization schemes for North African Arabic dialects and for Berber. The attempts for Arabic were unsuccessful, but Berber was more susceptible, having little established literature to stand in the way.
In the colonial era a French-based system was used. Though it has now fallen partly out of favor, it is still used for transcription of names into French. More recently the French institute of languages, INALCO, has proposed its own writing standard which now is the primary system used in mainly Kabyle-Berber writings in Kabylie, Algeria.
Other, slightly different, varieties of Latin-based standards have been used since the beginning of the 20th century by Berber linguists in North Africa, France, and recently at the University of Barcelona, Spain.
The Berber Latin alphabet of Northern-Berber usually consists of 34 letters:
In Northern-Berber texts, foreign words and names are written in their original form even if they contain the letters: O, P, V, or any other non-Berber letter (like: Ü, ß, Å,...).
The following table shows the Northern-Berber Latin alphabet with its Neo-Tifinagh and Arabic equivalents:
The Latin letter "O" does occur occasionally in Tuareg-Berber orthography. In Northern-Berber orthography it corresponds to the letter "U".
In the interest of pan-dialectal legibility, the Berber Latin alphabet omits the partly phonemic contrasts found in some Berber language varieties (notably the Kabyle language and Tarifit) between stops and fricatives.