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.
Every now and then, it’s nice to just point somewhere on a map and head out with no plan. In Taiwan, where convenience reigns, food options are plentiful and people are generally friendly and helpful, this type of trip is that much easier to pull off. One day last November, a spur-of-the-moment day hike in the hills of Chiayi County turned into a surprisingly memorable experience that impressed on me once again how fortunate we all are to call this island home. The scenery I walked through that day — a mix of forest and farms reaching up into the clouds
With one week left until election day, the drama is high in the race for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chair. The race is still potentially wide open between the three frontrunners. The most accurate poll is done by Apollo Survey & Research Co (艾普羅民調公司), which was conducted a week and a half ago with two-thirds of the respondents party members, who are the only ones eligible to vote. For details on the candidates, check the Oct. 4 edition of this column, “A look at the KMT chair candidates” on page 12. The popular frontrunner was 56-year-old Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文)
“How China Threatens to Force Taiwan Into a Total Blackout” screamed a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) headline last week, yet another of the endless clickbait examples of the energy threat via blockade that doesn’t exist. Since the headline is recycled, I will recycle the rebuttal: once industrial power demand collapses (there’s a blockade so trade is gone, remember?) “a handful of shops and factories could run for months on coal and renewables, as Ko Yun-ling (柯昀伶) and Chao Chia-wei (趙家緯) pointed out in a piece at Taiwan Insight earlier this year.” Sadly, the existence of these facts will not stop the
Oct. 13 to Oct. 19 When ordered to resign from her teaching position in June 1928 due to her husband’s anti-colonial activities, Lin Shih-hao (林氏好) refused to back down. The next day, she still showed up at Tainan Second Preschool, where she was warned that she would be fired if she didn’t comply. Lin continued to ignore the orders and was eventually let go without severance — even losing her pay for that month. Rather than despairing, she found a non-government job and even joined her husband Lu Ping-ting’s (盧丙丁) non-violent resistance and labor rights movements. When the government’s 1931 crackdown
RSS