How To Pretend You Speak Berber

So, for any of you who have actually been paying attention to the blog, or suffering my more in-depth e-mail complaints about the Tamazight language, you will know that one of my primary gripes is its failure to express adequately many concepts that most of us would consider to be rather basic. Now, that doesn’t mean that most people around me cannot grasp any complex ideas. Rather, most Berber dialects (to the dismay of the more hard-core advocates of a linguistic revival), borrow heavily from both Arabic and French. So, if you know just a little French, for example, you are likely to recognize the words (used in both Arabic and Tamazight, even where indigenous alternatives may exist) for commonplace items such as a car (tumubil), cheese (lfrmaj), telephone (tilifun), or toilet paper (ppapiyi jinik). Moroccan Arabic permeates Berber’s verb roots, as well as makes up for the lack of Tamazight nouns for more modern concepts. For example, all of the vocabulary I learned for my mock trial project last year was actually Arabic. The words simply don’t exist in Tamazight, so otherwise you are limited to phrases like “I have to defend myself” when you really want to say that you have an alibi.

With nouns borrowed from Arabic, the convention in Tamazight is often simply to add the letter “T” at the beginning and end of the word (these words are usually feminine, by the way; if a word is exactly the same as the Arabic, it will more likely be masculine, unless it already happens to end in an “A” sound). I have no idea how this happened. Did someone just think this was a sneaky way to co-opt another language without anyone noticing? Because, to me, that would be a lot like Pig Latin or Ob or one of those other ridiculous fake languages I used to torture adults with when I was a kid (“…wobon obof thobose robidobikyobulobous fobake lobangwobajobes obi yobusobed tobo tobortyobure obadobults wobith whoben obi wobas oba kobid”). For example, the word for “Arabic” in Arabic (Darija) is laarbiya, while in Tamazight, we call it tarabt (Tamazight also tends to lose the Arabic indefinite article “l”). The word for “house” in Arabic is dar, whereas (surprise!) in Tamazight it is taddart.

Then, there are words that are universal, such as “pizza” or “taxi.” (Way to go Western hegemony!!!)

So, a friend of mine who learned Arabic but who lives in a predominantly Berber town, has taken to calling Coca-Cola “tacokt.” The first time he said that to me, I laughed (once he explained what the hell he was talking about), but then felt – in a moment of Berber solidarity – a little offended. Yesterday, I realized he was not at all out of line. Because I don’t have Internet or mobile phone service where I live, and because I am a muskina (poor thing) for living alone away from my family, I often field questions about how often I speak with them and by what means. While I happen not to be a huge fan (especially when I cannot do it in the privacy of my own home), Internet chat is HUGE in Morocco. I listen to people on online dates all the time at the cyber cafés (often quite laughable). Anyway, yesterday, a girl I know who now lives in Errachidia (where Internet cafés abound) asked “Is dattchat?” (In this sense, “Is da…” is the equivalent of asking about whether one engages in an activity habitually). Now, even though we were talking about the Internet, my brain had apparently shut down. “Dattchat” sounds a lot like “you eat” or “you are eating,” but I knew that didn’t make any sense given the context. I asked her to repeat herself, but to no avail. Finally, knowing my friend speaks a little French, I asked her what that verb meant. “Chat!” she answered, “You know, when you use the Internet to talk to people.”

Taduuht.