Oral Knowledge in Berber Women's Expressions
of the Sacred

Fatima Sadiki

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Although still poorly understood, women in Morocco are deeply associated with the survival of Berber language and culture. In spite of its disadvantaged position in the Moroccan linguistic market, Berber has managed to survive from pre-historic times to the present-day, thanks to three major factors: Berber’s status as a mother tongue, female illiteracy, and the use of French in the Moroccan educational system. As a mother tongue, Berber possesses the dynamism and vitality which characterize this type of languages. The mother tongue status of Berber makes it closer than written languages to people’s everyday concerns and worries. Further, being a rural and oral, Berber is used by a great portion of rural and illiterate women. Additionally, the dissemination of education in the French language played a significant role in stripping learned languages such as Standard Arabic and French from religion in the minds of Moroccans. This greatly helped enhance Berber in the face of Islam-linked Standard Arabic.

The factors which helped maintain Berber in Morocco are directly related to women: women, most of whom are illiterate even now, are the ones who first speak Berber to their children, and hence transmit the cultural values of Berber culture. This makes Berber a female language. This does not mean that men do not use this language; it only means that they use it less than women. As a language of cultural identity, home, the family, village affiliation, intimacy, traditions, orality, and nostalgia to a remote past, Berber perpetuates attributes that are considered female in the Moroccan culture. The absence of Berber from the powerful public key institutional areas reinforces these attributes.

The contexts in which Berber is used indicate that this language is undergoing a conscious process of feminization on the part of mainstream language ideology. In other words, the situations in which Berber is used are more and more women-linked than men-linked. The constant reference of mainstream views in the political parties and the media to Berber as “indigenous,“ “private,“ and “traditional“ reinforce its feminization. Although the Berber population in Morocco cuts across the social variables of geographical origin, class, level of education, job opportunity, language skills, and marital status, a female Berber monolingual is allowed the least chances of social promotion. Illiteracy and a heavily gendered patriarchal social system render the situations in which Berber is used socially less advantageous than the ones in which Standard Arabic is used. Again, it is not the languages themselves that are “responsible“ for the reduced spectrum of chances but their situations of use. It is situations of use that attribute specific social meanings to particular languages. The fact that topics discussed in Berber are in the majority of cases associated to home and hearth limit the use of this language.

Women’s Orality in the Making of Moroccan History

Although quasi-absent from the official recordings of Moroccan history, recent writings in social history reveal women’s roles in the making of to- day’s Morocco. In addition to recent archeological findings, strong texts like Ibn Khaldun’s Al-Muqaddimah, gap-reading, and women’s written and oral texts I have been gathering, I used the tools I know best: linguistic method- ology and ethnographic study. Linguistic methodology consists in Berber data gathering, transliterating, translating into English and analysis; and ethnographic study in spending time with informants and allocating space for observation. The fact that Berber is my native language positions me as both an insider and an outsider in the process of data gathering, analysis and observation. Overall, the methodology used in preparing this chapter includes both reception and performance in examining women’s textual practices from the perspective of consumers, users and readers.

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