In Morocco’s High Atlas mountains, shepherds Hammou Amraoui and his son hardly need words to speak. Across peaks, they whistle at each other in a centuries-old language, now jeopardized by rural flight.
“The whistle language is our telephone,” joked Hammou, 59, the elder of a family known for the tradition in Imzerri, a hamlet in the remote commune of Tilouguit, about a two-hour drive from the nearest city.
In Tilouguit, Hammou said people learn it “like we learn to walk or to talk”.
Photo: AFP
The Assinsg language replaces spoken words with sharp whistles that can carry for nearly three kilometers in the mountains, according to researchers.
“The principle of the language is simple: the words are said in whistles and the key to understanding it is practice,” said Hammou’s 33-year-old son, Brahim. “It makes it easier for us to communicate, especially when we’re herding our livestock,” he added. Moroccan heritage researcher Fatima Zahra Salih described the whistle language as a cultural “treasure.”
For five years, she has studied it to prepare a case for its recognition and protection by the UN’s cultural agency UNESCO.
Whistle communication has been documented on nearly every continent, including the Spanish Canary Islands off Morocco’s Atlantic coast.
“A little more than 90 languages have a whistled form, documented in scientific publications,” said Julien Meyer, a linguist who specializes in the phenomenon.
In Morocco, it has so far only been documented in the Beni Mellal-Khenifra region of the central High Atlas mountain range, but Salih said she cannot rule out its existence elsewhere.
MOVING AWAY
Getting to Imzerri requires a climb along a dirt track winding through oak trees.
The village counts roughly 50 houses, none with running water or electricity.
Many families have moved away, threatening the survival of the whistle language.
“Our region is magnificent, but we live in isolation and difficult conditions,” said Aicha Iken, 51, who learned to whistle as a child while tending livestock. “Many of our neighbors have left.”
Poverty in Azilal province, where Imzerri lies, has dropped in recent years, but was still double the national average in 2024, at 17 percent.
Yet some families are determined to hold onto their land -- and their whistling tradition.
Brahim Amraoui has made sure his 12-year-old son, Mohamed, was one of the few children in the hamlet who knows how to whistle.
“At first, it was very hard,” said Mohamed, who dreams of becoming a pilot. “I could not understand everything, but after two years it’s getting better.”
His father said it was important to teach him the language, “even if he chooses a different profession”.
“My goal is for the whistle language to be preserved,” he added.
Since 2022, Brahim has led a small association dedicated to safeguarding the practice.
WHISTLE LANGUAGE ‘DISAPPEARING’
It isn’t just the villagers’ migration to urban areas that has put the language at risk of vanishing.
“The whistle language is disappearing little by little because of environmental degradation,” said Meyer.
Drought has gripped Morocco for seven straight years.
In November 2024, for the first time in their history, the Amraoui shepherds left their village to take their livestock on a nearly 350-kilometer journey east in search of pasture. They only came home seven months later.
“The move was painful, but we had no choice,” Hammou recalled. “We had nothing left to feed our animals.”
Salih said it was due to “climate change”, which has “disrupted their pastoral way of life”, where there used to be fixed seasonal pastures near their home they could travel between.
“For the first time, they had to practice nomadism,” she said of the Amraouis.
The shepherd family has pinned its hopes on potential rainfall this fall, hoping they would not be forced to move again.
But while they wonder whether they will have to, Salih insists on the “urgent need to safeguard” the whistle language before more people leave it behind alongside rural life.
Last week the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) announced that the legislature would again amend the Act Governing the Allocation of Government Revenues and Expenditures (財政收支劃分法) to separate fiscal allocations for the three outlying counties of Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu from the 19 municipalities on Taiwan proper. The revisions to the act to redistribute the national tax revenues were passed in December last year. Prior to the new law, the central government received 75 percent of tax revenues, while the local governments took 25 percent. The revisions gave the central government 60 percent, and boosted the local government share to 40 percent,
Many will be surprised to discover that the electoral voting numbers in recent elections do not entirely line up with what the actual voting results show. Swing voters decide elections, but in recent elections, the results offer a different and surprisingly consistent message. And there is one overarching theme: a very democratic preference for balance. SOME CAVEATS Putting a number on the number of swing voters is surprisingly slippery. Because swing voters favor different parties depending on the type of election, it is hard to separate die-hard voters leaning towards one party or the other. Complicating matters is that some voters are
Sept 22 to Sept 28 Hsu Hsih (許石) never forgot the international student gathering he attended in Japan, where participants were asked to sing a folk song from their homeland. When it came to the Taiwanese students, they looked at each other, unable to recall a single tune. Taiwan doesn’t have folk songs, they said. Their classmates were incredulous: “How can that be? How can a place have no folk songs?” The experience deeply embarrassed Hsu, who was studying music. After returning to Taiwan in 1946, he set out to collect the island’s forgotten tunes, from Hoklo (Taiwanese) epics to operatic
Well, it turns out I finally did live long enough to see everything. Last week Reuters reported on a statement from the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), America’s officially unofficial representative office in Taipei, that “China intentionally mischaracterises World War II-era documents, including the Cairo Declaration, the Potsdam Proclamation and the Treaty of San Francisco, to try to support its coercive campaign to subjugate Taiwan.” Not only did Reuters forward this crushing rejection of the claims of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), it even correctly represented US policy on Taiwan’s status. The director of the Ma Ying-jeou Foundation, Hsiao
RSS