The Kabyle are a Berber people living in the al-Quabail Mountains of North Africa, stretching across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and western Libya—an area often referred to as the Maghreb. Since the Berber Spring in 1980, Algerian Kabyle have been at the forefront of agitation for Berber rights in that country and demands for the official recognition of their language alongside Arabic.

Kabyle is also the Afro-Asiatic language spoken by the Kabyle people. There are over 3,000,000 speakers worldwide, the majority in Algeria, where there are 2,500,000 speakers.