[9] Despite this, certain (but not all[10]) Berberists such as members of the Algerian separatist Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylia use the term to imagine and describe a hypothetical federation spanning between the Canary Islands and the Siwa Oasis, a large swathe of territory including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Egypt, the Western Sahara, Burkina Faso and Senegal.
[11][12][13] Historically, Berbers did not see themselves as a single cultural or linguistic unit,[9] and there was no singular endonym for the speakers of the languages descended from what is now called Proto-Libyan nor was there a term for their land.
[15] The earliest known reference to the Berber people as one group comes in the form of Arabic بربر (barbar), as borrowed from Ancient Greek βᾰ́ρβᾰρος (bárbaros, 'barbarian').
[18] In an attempt to reclaim the identity from the history of colonization, the Agraw Imazighen (a Paris-based Kabyle activist association that dissolved in 1978 and was known as the Berber Academy before 1969) coined the term Tamazɣa using the pre-existing triconsonantal root M-Z-Ɣ[19] in the 1970s to refer to the lands where the different Berber languages were spoken.
[20] The term has been translated into Spanish as Mazigia, abbreviated as MZG and used as an alternative international license plate code for some people.