I have been reading about the use of tifinagh to write Berber languages and for a long time most Berber languages have been usually written using the Latin alphabet because it was a way to show rebelliousness against the prohibition of speaking these languages ought to the centralism of the governments and the religious connotations of Arabic because the Latin alphabet evoked the idea of western modernity.

But now Tamazight is taught in Moroccan schools and it has a certain recognition, and the tifinagh writing system which hadn't been used for many years has been resurrected. However, tifinagh is obviously decorative but it is also quite unknown. Don't you think it is a political maneuver to make the language an ornamental tourist attraction but not really a communication tool as valid as Arabic or French?

I think it's good to write Tamazight with Neo-Tifinagh instead of with Arabic or Latin. Tifinagh was originally designed for Berber (unlike Arabic or Latin) so it makes sense.

But Neo-Tifinagh is an adaptation of the Tifinagh system which had been kept alive by Tuaregs (I think). The rest of the berbers didn't write Tamazight using that system, and it has had to be changed to include some new sounds and now it even has vowels although the language has a consonant structure somehow similar to that in Arabic but there are even less long vowels... Anyway I do think Tifinagh is beautiful but I guess usability is also important.

It's not surprising that the Berber languages have a similar phonological structure to Arabic since they're not only related (both are members of the Afro-Asiatic family) but have been under the mutual influence of each other for hundreds of years.

That's right, there's a LOT of Arabic vocabulary in Tamazight.

But it's not like the Tuaregs are/were the only ones using Tifinagh. Other Berber peoples further north & east also have used forms of Tifinagh.

Yes, well I think it was also used to some extent to write Taqbaylit but none of the Imazighen I know is able to read it and its use is quite reduced to IRCAM texts and decoration. The only wikipedia in a Berber language is in Taqbaylit, isn't it?

A new state declared.
They seem to use Neotifinagh as their official writing system.
http://www.mnlamov.net/
Official website