The Shillah tongue, that is, the speech of the southern branch of the great Berber family, since 1799, when Venture de Paradis made his vocabulary, has greatly interested students of philology. Its great antiquity is undoubted, the term Amazirgh by which the Shillah designate themselves occurring in the pages of several classical writers under the form of Mazyes, Mazisci, and Mazyes. Though akin to the dialect spoken in the Riff mountains, and that of the Kabyles of Algeria, and possessing considerable affinity to the Tamashek spoken by the Tuaregs, it yet has considerable dialectic differences from all of them, though they have been usually held to be of one stock. The chief peculiarity that strikes a stranger is the formation of the feminine in nouns which is marked by the addition of a T at the beginning and the end of the word, as Amazirgh (noble), which becomes Tamazirght, when used for the speech of the Shillah people. Tarudant and Tafilet are merely Arabic words turned into Shillah by the addition of the two T’s, and rendered feminine to agree with the Arabic word Medina, a city.
The Shillah proper inhabit the whole range of the southern Atlas, the province of Sus, with that of the Ha-ha, and extend southward to the oasis of Tafilet, though there Arab and Shillah (Berber) tribes live close beside each other.
Place-names to which the word Ait (i.e., Ben or Mac) is prefixed, as Ait-Usi, Ait-Atta, Ait-M’tuga, etc., indicate that the district is inhabited by a Berber tribe.
I subjoin a short list of words, written down whilst detained in Kintafi, but without pretending to their absolute correctness, as my knowledge of Arabic (our means of communication) is very slight, and nothing is more difficult than to get uneducated men to repeat words, familiar, and therefore easy to themselves, several times over, so that a stranger may catch them. In order to show the entire dissimilarity of the two languages, I give the Arabic as well as the English equivalents.
The language is, to my ear, not so guttural, but more nasal than the Arabic of Morocco. I think that a stranger, ignorant of both languages, would acquire Shillah more easily than Arabic. Like the Romany, or Calo, spoken in Spain, Shillah has been greatly corrupted by an admixture of the dominant tongue, so much so that the native verbs are largely lost, and their use supplemented by verbs taken from Arabic.
In writing, the Shillah use the Arab [288] character, and as far as is known, only one book, known as El Maziri, a compendium of the observances and ceremonies of the Mohammedan religion, has been written in the Shillah tongue.
The language abounds in the nasal gh, which may be rendered by an extremely nasal r, but which, like the Arabic h (Ha), is almost impossible to be learnt, except from someone acquainted with the proper pronunciation, as no written directions explain the peculiar sound.
Many treatises on Shillah, Kayble, and Tamashek, and their differences and affinity, have appeared at different times, chiefly in French. Perhaps the best is that of the Marquis de Rochemontein, “Essai sur les rapports grammaticaux entre l’Egyptien et le Berbere,” Paris, 1876. Leo Africanus also asserts the affinity of the two tongues.