TAMAZGHA

Professor Chaker Speaks Out on the Tifinagh Script Issue

Hsen — 2004-01-18T20:46:25Z

Professor of Tamazight (Berber) and director of the Berber research center (CRB) in Inalco (Paris), Salem Chaker remains one of the architects of the standardization of Tamazight. He has organized several meetings of Amazigh language experts and other cultural figures (writers, artists...) from all over the world to discuss the standardization of the Tamazight writing system. When the Moroccan monarchy recently (see feature article) decided to impose the Tifinagh script as the only transcription for Tamazight in Morocco, we thought it would be important to get his opinion, as an expert, on the subject.

Kra Isallen : In an official statement King Mohamed VI announced the decision of IRCAM (French acronym for Royal Institute for Amazigh Culture) to adopt the Neo-Tifinagh alphabet as the only writing system for Tamazight in Morocco. As an Amazigh linguist, what is your reaction to this decision ?

Salem Chaker : I consider that it is at the same time a hasty and badly founded decision, and certainly a dangerous one for the future and development of Tamazight in Morocco. It also shows very clearly the confusion among those who are in charge of the Amazigh language in the North African countries. While no serious scientific debate on the question of the alphabet to use ever took place in Morocco or Algeria, the political leaders decided on an option that is totally disconnected from the current practice, both in Morocco and in the rest of the Amazigh world. Currently, as you know, the most functional Amazigh writing system is Latin character based. In Morocco, it is seconded by the Arabic character based alphabet.

K.I. : Isn't this a pernicious move aiming at the domestication of Tamazight by imposing a graphical tool while the language to be transcribed is not even recognized constitutionally ?

S. C : Indeed, it's the carriage before the horse ! The question of the legal status and, subsequently, the cultural and educational objectives of the teaching of Tamazight were neither clarified nor discussed. And graphic choices are imposed ! The goal can only be an attempt by the dominant spheres and their auxiliaries to take over the Amazigh field by driving this transitional period of Amazigh writing and teaching into a sure dead end.

K.I. : Do you think that in its current state, and taking into account the means available for research, that the choice of Tifinagh is the solution to the transcription of Tamazight ?

S. C : As you know, for all noted Amazigh experts who have dealt with this question, there is no doubt as to what the answer is. For my part, and I have explained my position during the past 20 years, the Tifinagh script is the historical writing system of Tamazight, but it has not been in effective use for centuries (certainly more than one millennium) in all of North Africa. Thus, it can only play an identity or emblematic role and cannot be used as a basis for a functional writing system that can easily be disseminated. Furthermore, no serious work has been done to bring it up to date and adapt it to the current needs, on the basis of a phonological study. The version currently in use, which is prevalent in certain Amazigh activist circles, is purely and simply aberrant since it is actually a phonetic notation of Kabyl based on Tifinagh characters. This was developed in 1970 in the Berber Academy circles by amateurs full of goodwill, but nonetheless without any linguistic training. The result is that the alphabet which is currently presented to us as the Amazigh alphabet is not an authentic one. It was strongly altered in order to transcribe the phonetic characteristics of Kabyl. It cannot thus be an Amazigh-wide alphabet.

K.I. : As the director of the Berber Research Center and as someone who has organized many meetings on the subject of standardization of the Amazigh transcription, don't you think that this decision undermines the advances made with the Latin writing system ?

S. C : The result of nearly 50 years of research on Tamazight is a phonological system derived from the Latin characters which has shown significant progress in the Kabyl area. As far as Kabyl is concerned and more generally as far as Algerian Tamazight is concerned, the transition to the Latin based system is sufficiently advanced so that one may not fear either an obstruction or regression. There are many publications, a press, literature, associations' newsletters and magazines which have gradually used the Latin based system. Started 40 to 50 years ago, it has seen some improvements and simplifications based on our recommendations during the past 20 years. In Morocco, however, where Tamazight writing is less extensive and unstable, and where competition between the Arabic and Latin based scripts exists, the decision to favor the Tifinagh script could have serious negative consequences. It may slow down or block the process of dissemination of the Amazigh written expression. The outcome will depend a lot on the users and in particular on the ability of the Moroccan Amazigh associations' movement to persevere in the direction it has formerly taken.

K.I. : The two speeches in which King Mohamed VI referred to the Amazigh language took place right after Kabylia's "Black Spring." Does this signal fear of seeing the Moroccan Amazigh raise the same questions as those raised by the Kabyls, and put pressure on the monarchy to attempt integration ?

S.C : I believe that this parameter is always present and can be used to answer this question, and this can be said about Morocco since 1980. It is clear that in this country, the monarchy, like all the established political forces, lives in fear of an evolution "Algerian style" as far as the Amazigh issue is concerned. In other words, they are afraid the Amazigh would become socially autonomous. This is made explicit in the political discourse of those close to the palace : "In this country, things do not happen the way they do in Kabylia because we do not typically address these issues through radical departures from past practice. The monarchy integrates and takes into account all of its subjects…" It is clear that the Moroccan authorities skillfully "anticipate" and take advantage of the fact that the Amazigh issue in Morocco does not have the same acuity and social anchoring as in Algeria. The goal is to try to defuse possible tensions by taking some preventive measures that would allow the government to control and take advantage of the situation. The creation of the IRCAM, as well as the adoption of the Tifinagh script are part of a strategy which aims at reducing the Amazigh social and political factor to nothing or close to nothing.

K.I. : Aren't the approaches taken by Algeria and Morocco similar as far as their handling of the Amazigh issue ?

S. C : Yes, obviously, even if the chronology and, especially, the balance of power are not the same in the two countries. In Algeria, the Amazigh socio-political struggle is a reality that is solidly anchored, which is not the case in Morocco. But the authorities of the two countries often use the same ways and means of neutralization. These include disqualification of the social actors, manipulation, administrative obstruction, direct involvement of the political authority in the management of all aspects, and especially, the absolute refusal to recognize the Amazigh linguistic and cultural rights. The two countries have engaged in perpetual juggling acts and shams in order to avoid posing clearly and answering the question of the legal status of the Amazigh language. These two countries, in fact, simply refuse to admit the social-linguistic reality, i.e., Tamazight is the language of the Amazigh and the legal consequences this implies. In other words, the Amazigh people have the right to their language and culture and Tamazight must be recognized and granted a legal status identical to that of Arabic.

K.I. : What are your recommendations to the Amazigh movement as to what alphabet to use ?

S. C : Contrary to appearances, even in a country as centralized as France, in terms of language and script, it has always been the users and producers (writers, journalists, publishers, editors...) who have determined the graphical and orthographical standard, not the government or administrations. Thus, I hope that the Amazigh producers in Morocco, and the associations will continue their work, with determination and tenacity, following the same path they have already taken.

The Current State of Tamazight in Morocco

Hsen — 2004-01-18T20:45:26Z

Organized by the association Tamazgha on June 28, 2003 in Paris, the talk by Abdellah Bounfour on the Amazigh issue in Morocco helped raise public awareness in regards to the political position of the Moroccan monarchy towards Tamazight. Reproduced below is a transcript of the talk, as well as a summary of the discussion that ensued.

The best way to approach this subject, it seems to me, is to relate the events in their chronology and, eventually, draw some provisional conclusions from this placement in a chronological perspective. For that I will consider three events : the publication of the Amazigh Manifesto by Mohamed Chafik, the creation of the Institut Royal pour la Culture Amazighe (IRCAM(2)), and the Monarchy's choice of Tifinagh as the official script for Tamazight.

The Amazigh Manifesto

I will not go over the content of this Manifesto ; I had done it when it first came out. What is important to point out is that this Manifesto appeared to many observers and actors of the Amazigh cultural movement as the foundation for the Amazigh identity claims. This vision of things was supported by the second argument discussed below. However, there are two other arguments that escaped their attention :

1. Mohamed Chafik is a nationalist who lived through the war for independence. He is totally impregnated with nationalism, including in the language that he uses today. This is an established fact. Perhaps the day will come when researchers will be interested in studying this language from the lexicon and rhetoric standpoints in order to better understand this period of Morocco's history. It is, therefore, not surprising that he entitled this text "Amazigh Manifesto," for the birth of the national movement is also a text whose title is "Manifesto for Independence." This similitude in the names of the two events is not fortuitous ; It is determined by a political culture, even if Chafik's objective has not been accepted by many nationalists. In any case, it was not part of the nationalist claims. On the contrary ! In addition, the structure and the content of the two manifestos are comparable in the sense that they are both drawn from historical and sociological considerations. Of course, one may believe this is the only possible form. Certainly not for us who know, today, that any new content implies a special form of speech, except when it is diluted in an old one. In any case, the orthodox nationalists have perceived the Manifesto as a manifesto for autonomy of the Amazighs. Even the companions of the author of the Manifesto were surprised by the tone and the content of the text.
A third similitude that deserves to be mentioned is the call for signatures of this Manifesto. We know that this is exactly the same operation that was used for the Manifesto for independence. As far as public opinion is concerned, personally I signed this Manifesto because it contained just claims, though I had some reservations about the analysis that preceded these claims. What I retained from the formal analysis of this text was that the claims made were rooted in the culture and the language of nationalism. Now, the Amazigh claim rejects the dogma of the orthodox nationalism founded exclusively on the Arabo-Islamic ideology. It, at least, includes the long time concealed, indeed fought, Amazighness by the tenors of the Arabo-Islamic nationalism. I am not certain this does justice to the Amazigh struggle. But, after all, one can see in the Manifesto an important breach in the nationalist discourse from within.

2. The most important characteristic of the Manifesto is the fact that its content makes no reference to the different events that have punctuated the history of the Amazigh cultural movement since the sixties. This omission or occultation did not go unnoticed by certain actors of this movement. I will quote a very important text, which, in my opinion, is the founding text : the Agadir Charter. This is a text that contains a number of minimal claims that the big associations of the Amazigh cultural movement of that time agreed upon, and which served as a common platform of action for these associations. One will note, therefore, the difference in the name. The fact that the Agadir Charter was a text commonly negotiated by legal institutions, and not an individual text, is something completely new in the history of the Amazigh movement. This is, therefore, an important event, to which probably the promoters did not give its just value.

In fact, the Agadir Charter marked the birth of a movement that risked becoming a mass movement, as someone has said recently. Additionally, it has spawned the creation of a multitude of associations in small towns and the countryside while, so far, the claim had been exclusively a big-city claim, of concern only to the Amazigh elite. From this standpoint, one can consider the Amazigh Manifesto a catalyst of this mass orientation towards a more restricted framework : that of a cultural claim, which was the first inspiration of the Amazigh movement at its beginnings. This has been the case for AMREC since its foundation.

The Creation of the IRCAM

Here again, I will not dwell on the content of the Dahir (law) instituting the IRCAM. However, I will summarize two points, which, I think, are interesting to meditate on. These are the public ceremony of the creation of IRCAM and the basic structures of the latter, particularly the board of directors.

1. I had noted that this ceremony was exceptional in its choice of venue and progression of events, as well as in the number and the quality of the guests. The place is the town of the maternal family of the king. To my knowledge, no Dahir has ever had a proclamation place of this kind. The natural place to proclaim a law, in Morocco, is the parliament and the official newspaper. To proclaim a law in the open air is unusual in the history of this country. This meant that the event deserved this unusual and exceptional proclamation. It does, indeed, for it put a symbolic and legal end to the identity monism inherited from the triumphant nationalism. And it was necessary to manage it in this manner so that it would not be perceived as a "deviation" or a disavowal of this nationalism, but rather a simple omission, a necessary complement, it seems, promised by Hassan II since independence. A delivered promise therefore !

2. The number and the quality of the guests of this ceremony are very significant. In fact, all the state institutions were represented, including political parties, labor unions, the civil society, including Amazigh associations that did or did not support the Amazigh Manifesto. Therefore one must conclude that the Amazigh issue went from being a concern of one group of the population to symbolically become the matter of the state and that of all Moroccans.

3. The board of directors posed a more delicate problem. The discussion focused on who will sit on the board. In a nutshell, two positions confronted each other. Being of an academic nature, the first one proposed that only Amazigh language and culture experts would be members, given that the basic mission of the IRCAM is to introduce the language in the educational system and to promote the Amazigh culture in the media and society at large. The second, the activists' position, demanded that the associative movement be represented. The first one forgets that the IRCAM, given its judicial statute, cannot be only academic, for if its nature were such, there would not be any reason for it to be tied to the monarchy ; it would have sufficed to tie it to the university. The too-close proximity to the center of political decisions imposes that it be not exclusively scientific. The second forgets that the IRCAM is not a framework for activism. How could it be when the institution itself is linked to the central power ? The two positions are therefore conflicting. Nevertheless, the current board of directors is composed of scientists and activists. Some will see this as a contradiction. The IRCAM is not only a place for scientific research but also a place where the Amazigh issue can be managed.

The Tifinagh Script

Here I will summarize the analysis I published in a monthly Moroccan journal. Note that the choice of Tifinagh is the first public decision made by the institute. The process that led to this decision is twofold : internal and external to the IRCAM.

1. The Institute's Center for Linguistic Development ─the only one to have recruited university language experts─ was in charge of preparing a scientific analysis of the three competing alphabets to be used as the basis for the choice of the official script. The Center did its work following an explicit methodology described in its documents. Thus, the problem is not to discuss the relevance of this methodology but to determine how it weighed on the decision, for the latter does not depend only on the scientific aspect. There is certainly the political aspect to consider ; that is when the external process comes into play.

2. Before the board meeting, a number of associations met in Meknès claiming the Latin script as their choice. The press gave a big coverage to this position and, thus, put pressure upon the IRCAM's board of directors. Later, associations of Islamic tendencies met and demanded that the Arabic script be selected. But to my knowledge, no association claimed the Tifinagh script. It is therefore clear that Arabic-Latin antagonism became a political issue, one that would weigh heavily on the choice to make to the point that the scientific opinion was completely ignored. The Tifinagh script was selected in order to "referee" this antagonism. And it was argued that this alphabet was not only adequate but it was also the original Amazigh alphabet. This, for a language expert, is very far from reality. Recall that the Tifinagh script, known to experts in Amazigh linguistics as the neo-Tifinagh, is not the same thing as the Libyan script, the original Amazigh alphabet, which is still hard to decipher. Neo-Tifinagh is a slight variation of the alphabet disseminated by the former Paris-based Amazigh academy, and which was specifically developed to transcribe the Kabyl idiom. This historic reminder is necessary, for the layperson truly believes that the neo-Tifinagh is the actual old Amazigh alphabet.

One will retain, therefore, that the hybrid constituency of the board of directors, in this particular case, was not in favor of the scientific and historic truth of the language. I will conclude with these two important points :

1. Having examined the events from 1967 to this day, I have no doubt that the Amazigh movement succeeded in carrying out many important actions. These include visibility of Amazigh associations, publishing in Tamazight and about Tamazight, Amazigh artistic production, which is in net explosion, the fact that Tamazight is becoming the means of communication of city-dwellers, and the return to their roots of Amazighs who were ashamed of their language and origin to the point of self-hate, a condition well described by Tunisian writer Albert Memmi in Le complex du colonisé (The Complex of the Colonized) and by Algerian philosopher Frantz Fanon in his writings.

2. Nevertheless, there still remains a lot to do. Though Amazighness has taught pluralism to Moroccans, not all of them have accepted it as a tangible part of the Moroccan identity and a factor to reckon with from now on. Since they, at least a non-negligible fringe, claim universal democratic values, credit should be given to the Amazigh cultural movement for not yielding on this linguistic and cultural plurality of the country, plurality already underlined in the Agadir Charter. Therefore, it is necessary to add another task that is more difficult and more complex : the claim of a resolutely modern Amazighness. But that is another issue.

Summary of the Discussion

The main questions revolved around the Tifinagh alphabet, comparison with the Algerian position, and the relationships between the Amazigh movement and the Islamic movement. On the Tifinagh subject, the lecturer referred the audience to an article he published on the subject and gave a copy to the representative of the association Tamazgha who will get permission from its magazine to distribute it and, eventually, to post it on-line. On the comparison with the Algerian position, he specially insisted on this false idea that the Amazigh movement is antagonist to Islamism. He reminded the audience that the history of North Africa teaches us that the Amazighs have widely contributed to the islamicization and Arabicization of the region. Islamism, as a political movement, is indeed a concern to the Amazigh movement. But it has also mobilized all those who claim to be modern. The problem is to define the content of this modernity.

According to the lecturer, the Kabyl specificity resides in a historic process that is different from the Moroccan case. Despite all that has been said on this subject, Kabylia, as all Algeria, lived a colonization that tried to destroy the structures and culture of Kabyl society. An important fact to mention is the establishment of the republican school as early as the 19th century in this region. The length of colonization and massive acculturation of Kabyls is different from the situation of Moroccan Amazighs. The lecturer ended the talk by recalling that nationalism incarnated by the states is a tangible fact. One can pretend to think of the Amazigh world as a whole, but the behaviors are more revealing. He recalled the manner in which the members of the World Amazigh Congress were designated. It was done by nationality, he said, and that is more than revealing, for these are the realities.

1- Abdellah Bounfour is a professor of Amazigh literature at the INALCO (National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations). He is one of the founders of the AMREC, the first Amazigh association created in Morocco in 1967.
2- French acronym for royal institute for the Amazigh culture.