Our series on Tamasheq, language of the Tuareg, gives a large place to music, with a cycle of songs by Moussa Ag Keyna from the band Toumast. In the following video, Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni, from the band Tinariwen, tells us, in Tamasheq, about his relation to his language and how he got to learn Tifinagh script.

The band Tinariwen was put together in the 80s, first informally, in an area located between the oasis of Tessalit in Mali, and Tamanrasset in Algeria. As activists of the Tuareg cause, they spent a few years in a training camp in Libya before the Tuareg rebellion outburst at the end of the decade. The 1994 peace agreements did not hold back their involvement and they became the spokespeople of a population who sees its culture changing, its resources declining, and its youth emigrating.

Tinariwen (meaning the deserts, plural for tenere) is now a band known worldwide, performing on the most prestigious stages across the planet, the Eurockéennes in France, Glastonbury in England, and Coachella in USA.

Their 5th album, Tassili, was issued this August 29, named after the southern region of Algeria where it was recorded. The tracks were put together between November and December 2010 around the fire of a Mauritanian tent, in the middle of the desert.

In substance one might deem the assouf (loneliness, nostalgia in Tamasheq) music of this new album to be « Tuareg blues », an encounter between blues, rock, and traditional Tuareg music. But in content this is more of an acoustic album, with the band members joined by a few American musicians such as Kyp Malone (TV On The Radio), Nels Cline (Wilco) and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

More on Tinariwen

Daniel Varrod’s review on Tinariwen – France Inter, September 1, 2011 (in French)

Tinariwen live:

September 3, 2011: Moseley Folk, Birmingham, UK

September 4, 2011: End Of The Road Festival, Larmer Tree Gardens, UK

September 6, 2011: Fabrik Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

September 7, 2011: WUK, Vienna, Austria

September 9, 2011: USF Verftet, Bergen, Norway

September 10, 2011: COSMOPOLITE, Oslo, Norway

September 21, 2011: 104, Paris, France

September 23-24, 2011: Babylon, Istanbul, Turkey

September 26, 2011: Tvornica, Zagreb, Croatia

September 30, 2011: O oh La La!, LA, USA

…

Image & sound: Arnaud Contreras
Translation: Moussa Ag Keyna
Editing: Caroline Laurent

Reminder: Tamasheq (or Tamajeq, or Tamaheq, stemming from the word Tamazight) is spoken by the Tuareg, a nomadic people that has been settled in the desert areas of North Africa for millennia, over a vast territory reaching from Mali to Libya, from Burkina Faso to Algeria, and including Niger. There are around one million speakers of Tamasheq.

Like Kabyle, Shawia, or Rifian, Tamasheq is in fact a variant of Berber (or Tamazight), a group of languages that covers the whole of North Africa (Marocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Niger, Mauritania, Mali, and Burkina Faso), not to mention a large diaspora in Europe and America. Total estimations account for over 45 million speakers of Berber languages.

One distinctive feature of the Berber language is its writing. An alphabet known as Tifinagh appeared during the first millennium B.C., and despite its disappearing in most of the North where it was replaced by Roman and Arabic alphabets, the Tuareg have been using it ever since. In the second half of the 20th century, a modern version, first created by the Berber Academy and then modified by linguists to reach a standard form that would be suitable to all the idioms, is now widely used in the North and was even formalized in Morocco in 2001. This Alphabet, known as Neo-Tifinagh, while raising enthusiasm in the North, still encounters reluctance among the Tuareg people.

See all videos in Tamasheq