Berbers are the indigenous peoples of North Africa west of the Nile Valley. They are discontinuously distributed from the Atlantic to the Siwa oasis, in Egypt, and from the Mediterranean to the Niger River. Historically they spoke various Berber languages, which together form a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Today many of them speak Arabic. Between 30 and 40 million Berber-speakers live within this region, most densely in Algeria and Morocco, becoming generally scarcer eastward through the rest of the Maghreb and beyond. Many Berbers call themselves some variant of the word Imazighen (singular: Amazigh), possibly meaning "free people" (the word has probably an ancient parallel in the Roman name for some of the Berbers, "Mazices"). this only what i got cowboy...