For over 5000 years, North Africa has been inhabited by Berbers, or Amazigh. For at least that long I‘m sure, Berbers have been yelling at each other in a slew of unintelligible guttural sounds and hacks that confuse and frustrate the untrained ear.
For a majority of those working with the Peace Corps Health and Environment Sectors, Berber is the lingua franca of our work. Assigned to mostly rural (and thus predominantly Berber) areas, those who wish to integrate into their communities and perform meaningful work are charged with acquiring working ability in these languages. For many, it is too large of a task. A language with no similarity in sound, usage, or structure to those we are familiar with, Berber is often impossible to learn.
For some reason unknown to me, I have an affinity for the language. After being assigned to an extremely isolated corner of the Middle Atlas mountain range, I discovered that my area had its own distinct language in which pronunciation, verb usage, structure, and nouns were completely different and bore little similarity to the Berber spoken in other parts of the country or even that which is spoken in the greater Middle Atlas region. Tamarmoucht, as locals call it, is an insane mixture of Berber and Arabic with organic and imported elements. Upon my arrival here, I was pretty intimidated by how very different it was to the Berber I learned in training, and how it apparently followed none of the “rules” of more widely spoken dialects.
I cannot estimate how much time I have spent studying the dialect, but during my first six months I know I practiced and studied at least 20 hours/week on vocabulary. I also spent countless hours chipping away at conversations of limited substance with my host family, with whom I stayed for four months.
Well over a year later, I have gained a deep appreciation for the richness of the language, and have more fun speaking it than I ever imagined. I am no longer limited by tongue- and throat-tiring pronunciation and constantly changing verb usage. I can think of 5 ways to say “chop wood” in Tamarmoucht. I was once interviewed on a Berber-language radio show about a cultural festival I was working at. I love speaking Berber.
Like many other things in life, Berber language abilities snowball. Once you learn a little, your desire to learn more increases. The more you desire it the harder you try, and the harder you try the better you get, and the better you get the easier it gets to keep getting better and better and better. Although I personally do not believe it is possible to achieve total fluency in Berber, I think you can become something resembling a fluent speaker. Lately, though I am white with blue eyes and blond hair, look, act and dress “western” or American, people have been asking me where in Morocco I am from. This is an extremely gratifying question to be asked, and one I often indulge by asking people to guess by the way I speak and look. The answers I get are hilarious and fun.
The best thing about speaking Tamarmoucht is open doors. In this region, I feel I can go anywhere and do anything and be taken care of because Berbers just want to sit and hear me talk. To the north of my Commune lies a vast expanse of rough mountains, rivers, forests and high plains. The existing human infrastructure in this region is cursory, and reflects well-worn nomadic routes more than trade connections. Exploring on foot in these areas is insane. With language, I can walk into any far-flung village and be invited into homes, where time has stood still for decades. Most of the families survive on herding and traditional crops, and work from sun-up to sundown. Talking with these people and contributing my services as a health educator for a few hours is one of my favorite things to do in this country.
I am always fascinated by how far I do not have to go from my home to find adventure and feel like I am in cultural outer space. Often there are things happening within one hundred meters of my home that I have no understanding of.
My next near-home adventure is going to be trekking out to the high plains about 20km from my house to meet up with some semi-nomadic herders. These families walk between 100 and 300km seasonally to green pastures in the Middle Atlas region, carrying everything they need on mules and their backs. They build their wool tents on high-altitude plains and next to springs and stay until it is too cold to stay so high. During longer treks, I have run into a few families and been invited into their tents for a meal. They often lobby for me to stay. I never take the invitation because it would be a huge stress on their supplies to feed an extra big mouth. I am planning to take 4-5 days, pack in some food for a family, show up at a tent and stay there, doing whatever chores or duties they assign me.
