Catalonia’s Amazigh diaspora is preserving and transmitting its language and culture – through community-run classes and workshops, and through digital projects helping the language and its many variants to flourish online.

Catalonia’s Amazigh diaspora is preserving and transmitting its language and culture – through community-run classes and workshops, and through digital projects helping the language and its many variants to flourish online.

“My favourite word in Amazigh has always been tayri, which means ‘love’. In fact, it was the first word I learned. What’s yours?”

It is one of the short reels posted by the Instagram account @amazightalks, which, with more than 27,000 followers, shares insights into Amazigh history, language and culture. Behind it is Lalla Ghizlan Baryala, 28, born in Barcelona to an Amazigh father from Morocco’s Atlas region and an Arab mother from Tangier in the country’s north.

Baryala began to rediscover her father’s language, Amazigh, as a teenager. Her parents had chosen to raise her in Spanish to help her integrate in Catalonia. “Over time I would hear my father speaking to relatives or listening to music in a language I didn’t understand. But it stirred something very emotional in me. I wanted to know more.”

Gradually, her curiosity deepened, eventually leading her to launch the account. “It helped me reconnect with my identity and my roots – and it’s brought me closer to many other Amazigh people in the diaspora who write to me saying that, like me, they know very little about their own language and heritage.”

A language spread across north Africa

Amazigh (Tamaziɣt) encompasses a group of minoritised linguistic varieties spoken by the indigenous peoples of north Africa. Today it stretches from the Mediterranean to the Sahel, and from Egypt’s Siwa oasis to the Atlantic. Although precise data is lacking, more than 20 million people are estimated to speak it, scattered across a vast territory.

It is spoken mainly in Algeria and Morocco – where more than 90% of Amazigh speakers live – particularly in three major dialect zones: the Rif, the Atlas and the Sous region. Smaller communities exist in Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, Chad and Egypt.

Until recently, Amazigh was largely an oral language. It comprises numerous dialectal variants with significant differences between them, partly due to the geographic separation of communities concentrated in mountains, oases, valleys and coastal enclaves. That fragmentation has also been shaped by the historical dominance of colonial languages – French and Spanish – and by Arabisation linked to the spread of Islam.

In Catalonia, the Amazigh diaspora is estimated at between 100,000 and 200,000 people. Most come from two areas of Morocco: the south-east, with communities concentrated in towns such as Cornellà, Sabadell and Tortosa; and the Rif in the north, with a strong presence in Osona, the Maresme and the Empordà.

According to Catalonia’s 2023 language use survey, around 45,600 people aged over 15 identify Amazigh as their mother tongue – more than those who cite French, English or Italian. Some estimates suggest it may be Catalonia’s third most spoken first language, though reliable statistics are lacking, not least because many Amazigh speakers do not declare it as such.

That reluctance reflects decades of socially constructed linguistic inequality. In both Morocco and Algeria, Arabic has long held hegemonic status as the language of the Qur’an and Islam, while French has been associated with modernity and prestige.

“Many Amazigh speakers still associate the language with rural life and a lack of education,” Baryala says. “My parents’ generation often thought: ‘Amazigh won’t put food on the table.’ So in many cases they chose not to pass it on. We’ve internalised centuries of marginalisation and don’t always value our language enough.”

Women as guardians of Amazigh identity

Within the diaspora, as in many cultures, women have played a central role in transmitting the language. Fatiha Ait Hssain, 35, moved to Tortosa in 2008 from Tinghir in south-eastern Morocco. “It’s almost desert, but everyone speaks Amazigh. My mother hardly speaks Arabic. So I decided to speak Amazigh to my four daughters.”

Ait Hssain also works as an interpreter from Amazigh into Catalan or Spanish through the association Atzavara Arrels, assisting in courts or police stations when needed. “It makes me happy to see Amazigh people continuing to use their language here,” she says.

Yet invisibility remains a problem. Within the broader Moroccan community in Catalonia, Amazigh speakers are often subsumed under Arabic, undermining their linguistic rights. Studies have documented cases in which Amazigh-speaking women lack access to public services in their own language. Courts typically provide Arabic interpreters; if an Amazigh speaker cannot explain herself to a psychologist, lawyer or judge, the consequences can be serious. In medical appointments, some women rely on their children to translate, compromising privacy.

The absence of services and support networks can lead to isolation, particularly for women who speak only Amazigh.

When Ait Hssain’s daughters return to their village for Christmas, she says, “they’re excited – not just because they understand everyone, but because they connect with a completely different rhythm of life: people chopping wood, baking bread at home, caring for animals. There’s more calm, more trust.”

She, too, faced a dilemma: whether to prioritise Amazigh or Moroccan Arabic (darija). “Arabic is important for reading the Qur’an, and for practical things in Morocco. It’s a debate many Amazigh mothers in the diaspora have had. But they’ll have more opportunities to learn Arabic. I am Amazigh. If I don’t teach my language and culture to my children, who will?”

Baryala recognises the tension. “Many Amazigh women have internalised the idea that our language is second-class. If you’re Muslim, it can feel as though you must choose between Arabic and Amazigh – as if they were mutually exclusive identities. It’s taken me time to accept that I can be both.”

Community classes and institutional gaps

The Amazigh community in Catalonia has organised itself through various associations. One of the main ones is the Casa Amaziga de Catalunya.

“In the beginning, in 2010, it was created to work for the social rights of Amazigh people, for the rights of migrants in Catalonia. But very soon we took up the defence of linguistic rights and the teaching of the Amazigh language to children as one of our main demands, continuing the work of earlier organisations such as the Assemblea Amaziga de Catalunya or Bayt al-Thaqafa, the House of Culture,” explains Aziz Baha, former president of Casa Amaziga de Catalunya, social educator and teacher of Amazigh language and culture from 2008 to 2014.

Classes have been maintained since 2004 through an agreement with the Department of Education of the Government of Catalonia, with the support of organisations such as CIEMEN and the Fundació pels Drets Col·lectius dels Pobles in Sabadell, Manresa, Montcada i Reixac and Granollers. At present, however, there are only two stable groups left in Sabadell. Baha identifies several reasons for this situation:

“On the one hand, there are families who unfortunately do not see the usefulness of their children studying Amazigh. On the other, we lack the resources to carry out this work: the Department of Education should be able to promote these classes directly. It is one of the most widely spoken languages among Catalan citizens, after Catalan and Spanish,” he notes.

In addition, Baha explains that Morocco does not sufficiently support Amazigh either. “There are bilateral agreements with Morocco to teach Moroccan culture and language to children of Moroccan origin in the diaspora. But in practice, only Arabic is taught. As if Amazigh were not an important part of Moroccan culture! It is discrimination.”

In 2011, the Morocco Constitution recognised Amazigh as an official language (between 40% and 50% of the population speaks it) and promised to introduce it into the education system. In reality, however, fewer than 15% of pupils in the country study it, according to 2025 data from the Ministry of Education, and in secondary education it is almost non-existent. A report presented in 2023 by three Amazigh and minority rights organisations lowers the figure to under 10% and points to a lack of sufficient commitment by the Moroccan state to implement the language’s official status in education.

The organisations report that between 2018 and 2022 the number of students receiving Amazigh instruction fell from 600,000 (official figure) to 350,000 (according to Minority Rights Group), a number which the ministry now claims has risen to 650,000. They also criticise the fact that, by 2030, only the generalisation of Amazigh teaching in primary education is planned, and that the number of teachers trained each year is insufficient to meet actual needs.

Schooling has been one of the main cultural battlegrounds in Morocco over recent decades, both for defenders of the Amazigh language and for those who have sought to marginalise it. During the colonial period, when Morocco was a French protectorate (1912–1956), although French elites viewed Amazigh as a “backward” language, they opened some Franco-Amazigh schools in the regions of Fes and Meknes and attempted to grant Amazigh communities a separate jurisdiction (the 1930 dahir), with the aim of separating them from Arabs and assimilating them into French culture.

After independence, Arabisation was imposed in education, sidelining both French, the colonial language, and Amazigh, which was regarded as a symbol of division within the Moroccan people at a time of national identity-building.

“At school, I remember we had to speak Darija Arabic not only in the classroom but also in the playground. It was imposed, because in reality all of us pupils came from Amazigh-speaking villages in the area, but if we spoke Amazigh, we were scolded,” recalls Aziz Baha, who is originally from the Drâa-Tafilalet region, in the eastern Atlas.

Now that Amazigh is officially recognised, there is nevertheless clear stagnation — or even institutional blockage — in the implementation of language teaching in Morocco, as Minority Rights Group’s report indicated. Difficulties in rolling out education policies nationwide and the shortage of qualified teachers are among the reasons cited.

Rachid Raha, president of the Assemblea Mundial Amaziga, suggested other possible explanations during a conference on International Mother Language Day in February 2023: for example, that Amazigh teaching materials may not align with the deeply religious values currently conveyed through the country’s Arabic-language schooling, or that certain historical narratives may not fit the official accounts of national identity-building.

Growing the language through socialisation

Omaima Baychou, 20, is now one of the teachers in Sabadell. “I was first a student; now I teach. These classes are vital because children who learn Amazigh at home can socialise with peers their age, learn to write it and hear it spoken by others. Otherwise, it’s very hard to maintain it when school and daily life are mostly in Catalan or Spanish.”

She also teaches Tifinagh, the Amazigh alphabet, often used as a symbolic and political marker of identity.

Between 2018 and 2022, the Casa Amaziga de Catalunya and CIEMEN developed 24 teaching units, complete with audio recordings and guides in Catalan and French. Coordinated by the University of Barcelona academic Carles Múrcia, who also co-authored a Catalan–Amazigh dictionary, the materials have been used in schools in both Catalonia and Morocco.

Baychou believes they could be further adapted. “My students range from four to 12. We need age-specific materials. And it’s important that resources go beyond the classroom and reach more people digitally through social media.”

Amazigh online: towards standardisation?

That digital ambition underpins the Awal campaign, a project led by Col·lectivaT, the Casa Amaziga de Catalunya and CIEMEN. Built on community participation, Awal gathers voice recordings and translated texts to preserve and strengthen the language online. Its original aim was to develop an Amazigh online translator; while major tech companies have since launched tools of their own, Awal now contributes open-access materials that developers can use to improve machine translation systems.

Farida Boudichat, a linguist of Rif heritage who has studied Amazigh in Osona, sees potential. “In the diaspora I’ve always missed a tool to check how to say a specific word in Amazigh,” she says.

Yet standardisation remains a challenge. Awal draws on a compositional, plural model that respects the horizontal, decentralised nature of Amazigh society. But debates persist: are Rif and central Amazigh dialects of a single language, or distinct languages in their own right? Even Boudichat and Baryala, collaborators on the project, sometimes struggle to understand each other fully.

“Still, it’s important that people from different regions are involved,” Boudichat says. “It enriches the process.”

For Baryala, participation is key. “What matters is that the community feeds this tool so there’s more content in our language online, and people can increasingly learn it independently.”

She sees a generational shift. “We’re connecting differently: creating audiovisual content for Instagram or TikTok, making podcasts, building community through social media. Our activism is more digital now.”

But physical spaces still matter, Boudichat adds. “Celebrating the Amazigh new year, music, culture – these events encourage people to engage. Combining language workshops with cultural, culinary or craft activities would create more relaxed spaces where we can share experiences as Amazigh people in the diaspora – and talk about our language from a different place.”

https://www.nationalia.info/new/11745/the-diversity-of-amazigh-from-classrooms-to-screens