Tachelhit Language Services

Shilha /ˈʃɪlhə/, now more usually known as Tashelhit /ˈtæʃəlhit/, is a Berber language spoken by more than seven million people in southwestern Morocco. The endonym is Taclḥiyt /taʃlʜijt/, and in recent English publications the language is often rendered Tashelhit, Tashelhiyt or Tashlhiyt. In Moroccan Arabic the language is called Šəlḥa, from which the English name Shilha is derived. 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 tachelhit, chelha or chleuh.

Shilha is spoken in an area covering c. 100,000 square kilometres, making the language area approximately the size of Iceland, or the US state of Kentucky. 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 Souss 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.

In the north and to the south, Shilha borders Arabic-speaking areas. In the northeast, roughly along the line Marrakesh-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.

Completely reliable data on the number of Berberophones in Morocco do not exist. Ethnologue, in its 17th–20th editions (2014–2017, s.v. Tachelhit) cited the numbers yielded by the Moroccan census of 2004, according to which there were around four million speakers of Shilha, accounting for thirteen percent of the total population. In its 21st edition (2018), Ethnologue quotes a number of around seven million speakers for the year 2016 (source not mentioned), or twenty percent of the population. Assuming that Ethnologue’s figure for 2016 is correct, it appears that the 2004 census seriously underreported the number of speakers, as it is highly unlikely that the proportion of Shilha speakers in Morocco has actually risen by seven percentage points between 2004 and 2016.

Some authors mention a much higher number of Shilha speakers. Stroomer (2001a) estimated that there are “some 6 to 8 million” speakers, and he subsequently (2008) raised the number to “some 8 to 9 million”.[11] Stroomer does not refer to any published sources supporting his estimates, which are certainly too high.

Although many speakers of Shilha, especially men, are bilingual in Moroccan Arabic, there are as yet no indications that the survival of Shilha as a living language will be seriously threatened in the immediate future. Because of the rapid growth of the Moroccan population over the past decades (from 12 million in 1961 to over 33 million in 2014), it is safe to say that Shilha is now spoken by more people than ever before in history.

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.”[12] 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.”

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.