Ibn Tunart

Ibn Tunart or Ibn Tunirt, whose full name was Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Ja'far al-Qaysi, was born in 1085 in the Qal'at Bani Ḥammad. He studied in Béjaïa then in Cordoba. He later became a teacher and judge in Fez. He died in the same city in 1172.

Works Ibn Tunart wrote an Arabic-Tamazight dictionary known as Kitāb al-asmā’ (the book of names).

The observation is that the lexicon of the manuscript belongs mainly to Tashelhiyt, spoken in the southwest of Morocco. However, we find terms belonging to other varieties and sometimes specific to a particular area or even restricted to particular dialects: Ibn Tunart's dictionary was also compiled in 1145, either before the conquest of its region by the Almohads, which makes it more likely that this dictionary was recovered and altered by Chleuh speakers in more recent times, given the four available copies of this text, which are several centuries later than the original work.