Tashelhiyt or Tachelhit ( ; from the endonym , ), also known as Shilha ( ; from its name in Moroccan Arabic, ) is a Berber language spoken in southern Morocco by the Shilha people. When referring to the language, anthropologists and historians prefer the name Shilha, which is in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Linguists writing in English prefer Tashelhit (or a variant spelling). In French sources the language is called , or .
As of the 2024 Moroccan census, Shilha is spoken by 14.2% of the population, or approximately 5.2 million people. The area comprises the western part of the High Atlas mountains and the regions to the south up to the Draa River, including the Anti-Atlas and the alluvial basin of the Sous River. The largest urban centres in the area are the coastal city of Agadir (population over 400,000) and the towns of Guelmim, Taroudant, Oulad Teima, Tiznit and Ouarzazate.Adnor, Abdellah (2004). An Electronic Tashlhit-English Dictionary (Prototype) (PhD thesis). Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco. p. 13-14.
In the north and to the south, Shilha borders Arabic-speaking areas. In the northeast, roughly along the line Demnate-Zagora, there is a dialect continuum with Central Atlas Tamazight. Within the Shilha-speaking area, there are several Arabic-speaking enclaves, notably the town of Taroudant and its surroundings. Substantial Shilha-speaking migrant communities are found in most of the larger towns and cities of northern Morocco and outside Morocco in Belgium, France, Germany, Canada, the United States and Israel.
Shilha possesses a distinct and substantial literary tradition that can be traced back several centuries before the protectorate era. Many texts, written in Arabic script and dating from the late 16th century to the present, are preserved in manuscripts. A modern printed literature in Shilha has developed since the 1970s.
Name Shilha speakers usually refer to their language as .Justinard (1914:2), Destaing (1920:166), Galand (1988, 1.14). This name is morphologically a feminine noun, derived from masculine "male speaker of Shilha". Shilha names of other languages are formed in the same way, for example "an Arab", "the Arabic language".Destaing (1920:20, 166). See also .
The origin of the names and has recently become a subject of debate (see Shilha people#Naming for various theories). The presence of the consonant in the name suggests an originally exonymic (Arabic) origin. The first appearance of the name in a western printed source is found in Mármol's (1573), which mentions the "indigenous Africans called Xilohes or Berbers" ().Marmol (1573, book I, chapter XXXIII, fol. 43v).
The initial in is a Shilha nominal prefix (see ). The ending (borrowed from the Arabic suffix ) forms denominal nouns and adjectives. There are also variant forms and , with instead of under the influence of the preceding consonant .Stumme (1899:3); Laoust (1936:v). The plural of is ; a single female speaker is a (noun homonymous with the name of the language), plural .
In Moroccan colloquial Arabic, a male speaker is called a , plural , and the language is ,Fox and Abu-Talib (1966:155), Colin (1993:976). a feminine derivation calqued on . The Moroccan Arabic names have been borrowed into English as a Shilh, the Shluh, and Shilha, and into French as , , and or, more commonly, .
The now-usual names and in their endonymic use seem to have gained the upper hand relatively recently, as they are attested only in those manuscript texts which date from the 19th and 20th centuries. In older texts, the language is still referred to as or "Tamazight". For example, the author Awzal (early 18th c.) speaks of "a composition in that beautiful Tamazight".Awzal, , v. 5 (edition in van den Boogert 1997).
Because Souss is the most heavily populated part of the language area, the name (lit. "language of Souss") is now often used as a pars pro toto for the entire language.Justinard (1914:2), Laoust (1936:vi). A speaker of is an , plural , feminine , plural .
Number of speakers
With 4.7 million speakers or 14% of Morocco's population, Tachelhit is the most widely spoken Amazigh language in the Kingdom, ahead of Tamazight and Tarifit. Its speakers represent more than half of the 8.8 million Amazighophones.
It is also the Amazigh language that has the greatest geographical extension in the country. Its speakers are present in 1512 of the 1538 municipalities in the kingdom. This distribution is notably the result of a large diaspora of small traders who have settled throughout the country, but also of workers in search of employment opportunities.
Five Moroccan regions have a rate of Tachelhit speakers higher than the national average: Souss-Massa, Guelmim-Oued Noun, Marrakesh-Safi and Drâa-Tafilalet and Béni Mellal-Khénifra. However, only one of them has a majority of Tachelhit speakers: Souss–Massa with 63.2% of its population. This rate drops to 48.1% for Guelmin-Oued Noun, 25.8% for Drâa-Tafilalet, 24.5% for Marrakesh–Safi, and 14.4% in Béni Mellal-Khénifra.
Like the high concentration of Tachelhit-speaking speakers in Dakhla, Tachelhit is spoken significantly by many inhabitants, in Moroccan municipalities outside the area where the language historically originated. With 49% of its speakers living in cities, Tachelhit has become highly urbanized. Thus, 10% of Casablancais speak Tachelhit, i.e. more than 334,000 people. Casablanca is therefore the first Tachelhit city in Morocco, ahead of Agadir (225,000 speakers). Similarly, 9.2% of Rbatis speak Tachelhit, i.e. more than 52,000 people, or 4% of Tangiers and Oujdis. Finally, there are singular cases of very outlying municipalities such as the fishing village of Imlili, south of Dakhla (60% of speakers). These situations are reminiscent of the historical migrations that have followed one another over the long term and especially the massive rural exodus that began in the 20th century towards the economic metropolises.
Dialects Dialect differentiation within Shilha, such as it is, has not been the subject of any targeted research, but several scholars have noted that all varieties of Shilha are mutually intelligible. The first was Stumme, who observed that all speakers can understand each other, "because the individual dialects of their language are not very different."Stumme (1899:4). This was later confirmed by Ahmed Boukous, a Moroccan linguist and himself a native speaker of Shilha, who stated: "Shilha is endowed with a profound unity which permits the Shluh to communicate without problem, from the Ihahan in the northwest to the Aït Baamran in the southwest, from the Achtouken in the west to the Iznagen in the east, and from Aqqa in the desert to Tassaout in the plain of Marrakesh."Boukous (1977:126).
There exists no sharply defined boundary between Shilha dialects and the dialects of Central Atlas Tamazight (CAT). The dividing line is generally put somewhere along the line Marrakesh-Zagora, with the speech of the Ighoujdamen, Iglioua and Aït Ouaouzguite ethnic groups belonging to Shilha, and that of the neighboring Inoultan, Infedouak and Imeghran ethnic groups counted as CAT.
Writing systems
Though Tashelhit has historically been an oral language, manuscripts of mostly religious texts have been written in Tashelhit using the Arabic script since at least the 16th century. Today, Tashelhit is most commonly written in the Arabic script, although Neo-Tifinagh is also used.
Literature
Shilha has an extensive body of oral literature in a wide variety of genres (fairy tales, animal stories, taleb stories, poems, riddles, and tongue-twisters). A large number of oral texts and ethnographic texts on customs and traditions have been recorded and published since the end of the 19th century, mainly by European linguists.
Shilha possesses an old literary tradition. Numerous texts written in Arabic script are preserved in manuscripts dating from the 16th century. The earliest datable text is a compendium of lectures on the "religious sciences" () composed in metrical verses by , who died in 1597. The best known writer in this tradition is Mḥmmd u Ɛli Awzal, author of "The Cistern" (a handbook of Maliki law in verse), "The Ocean of Tears" (an adhortation, with a description of Judgment Day, in verse) and other texts.Van den Boogert (1997) offers a first exploration of Shilha manuscript literature, including an edition and translation of Awzal's work . An older edition of this work, in the original Arabic script, is in Stricker (1960).
Modern Tashelhit literature has been developing since the end of the 20th century.
Research The first attempt at a grammatical description of Shilha is the work of the German linguist Hans Stumme (1864–1936), who in 1899 published his . Stumme's grammar remained the richest source of grammatical information on Shilha for half a century. A problem with the work is its use of an over-elaborate, phonetic transcription which, while designed to be precise, generally fails to provide a transparent representation of spoken forms. Stumme also published a collection of Shilha fairy tales (1895, re-edited in Stroomer 2002).
The next author to grapple with Shilha is Saïd Cid Kaoui (Saʿīd al-Sidqāwī, 1859-1910), a native speaker of Kabyle from Algeria. Having published a dictionary of Tuareg (1894), he then turned his attention to the Berber languages of Morocco. His (1907) contains extensive vocabularies in both Shilha and Central Atlas Tamazight, in addition to some 20 pages of useful phrases. The work seems to have been put together in some haste and must be consulted with caution.
On the eve of the First World War there appeared a small, practical booklet composed by Captain (later Colonel) Léopold Justinard (1878–1959), entitled . It contains a short grammatical sketch, a collection of stories, poems and songs, and some interesting dialogues, all with translations. The work was written while the author was overseeing military operations in the region of Fez, shortly after the imposition of the French protectorate (1912). Justinard also wrote several works on the history of the Souss.
Emile Laoust (1876–1952), prolific author of books and articles about Berber languages, in 1921 published his (2nd enlarged edition 1936), a teaching grammar with graded lessons and thematic vocabularies, some good ethnographic texts (without translations) and a wordlist.
Edmond Destaing (1872–1940) greatly advanced knowledge of the Shilha lexicon with his (1920) and his (1940, with copious lexical notes). Destaing also planned a grammar which was to complete the trilogy, but this was never published.
Lieutenant-interpreter (later Commander) Robert Aspinion is the author of (1953), an informative though somewhat disorganized teaching grammar. Aspinion's simple but accurate transcriptions did away with earlier phonetic and French-based systems.
The first attempted description in English is Outline of the Structure of Shilha (1958) by American linguist Joseph Applegate (1925–2003). Based on work with native speakers from Ifni, the work is written in a dense, inaccessible style, without a single clearly presented paradigm. Transcriptions, apart from being unconventional, are unreliable throughout.
The only available accessible grammatical sketch written in a modern linguistic frame is "" (1988) by Lionel Galand (1920–2017), a French linguist and berberologist. The sketch is mainly based on the speech of the Ighchan ethnic group of the Anti-Atlas, with comparative notes on Kabyle of Algeria and Tuareg of Niger.
More recent, book-length studies include Jouad (1995, on metrics), Dell & Elmedlaoui (2002 and 2008, on syllables and metrics), El Mountassir (2009, a teaching grammar), Roettger (2017, on stress and intonation) and the many text editions by Stroomer (see also ).
Phonology
Stress and intonation There is currently no evidence of word stress in Tashlhiyt.
Vowels