The indigenous peoples of North Africa west of Egypt call themselves Imazighen, the plural of Amazigh, ordinarily translated as free or noble people. The familiar English word for them, Berber, comes through Arabic from the Latin barbarus, the word Greeks and Romans used for anyone who did not speak their language, and a great many Imazighen reject it for that reason. The atlas uses the endonym as the name and carries the exonym as an alias, which is the treatment this type applies wherever a community has a word of its own.
The grouping covers the Kabyle and Chaoui of Algeria, the Rif and Chleuh of Morocco, the Tuareg of the Sahara, the Siwi of the Egyptian oasis and the Zenaga of Mauritania, among others. The languages belong to the Berber branch of Afro-Asiatic and are not all mutually intelligible. The peoples are attested in Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Arabic sources across three thousand years, and the shared identity is the recent part: it was consolidated by the Amazigh cultural movement of the twentieth century, which won recognition of Tamazight as an official language in Morocco in 2011 and in Algeria in 2016. Tifinagh, the script used for Tuareg and revived in a standardised form for Tamazight, descends from the ancient Libyco-Berber alphabet and is now taught in Moroccan schools, which makes it one of very few ancient scripts brought back into ordinary official use.