In Morocco’s Azilal region, deep in the Atlas Mountains some 400 kilometers southeast of Rabat, a centuries-old whistled language once common among herders is falling silent. What began as a practical tool for survival; used to guide goats, send messages across valleys, and maintain contact over long distances, now stands at risk of extinction as drought, rural poverty, and depopulation reshape the mountain communities that gave it life.
For generations, shepherds in the highlands of Azilal communicated through a series of sharp, melodic whistles that carried for kilometres across the rocky terrain. Known locally as “timgircht”, the language was passed orally from parents to children, blending elements of Amazigh phonetics with acoustic adaptations that transformed speech into pitch and rhythm. In places where neither electricity nor mobile coverage existed, this system was more than heritage, it was infrastructure. A single whistle could signal danger, summon help, or direct herds across slopes too distant for the human voice.
Read also: Senegal’s $900 million ‘Pink Lake’ housing project sparks local opposition over environmental risks
Today, however, the conditions that sustained this form of communication are disappearing. Extended drought cycles, worsened by climate change, have reduced pastures, forcing pastoral families to abandon traditional herding routes. According to Morocco’s Ministry of Agriculture, more than 80% of rural households in the Atlas Mountains have reported declining incomes over the past decade due to water scarcity, livestock losses, and soil degradation. As families move to urban areas like Beni Mellal or Casablanca, the intergenerational transmission of the whistled language breaks, replaced by mobile phones and standard speech.
The story of Azilal’s whistlers reflects a broader truth about the climate crisis in North Africa: it is not only eroding ecosystems but also the cultural systems that depend on them. Across Morocco’s mountainous and semi-arid regions, the retreat of traditional livelihoods has led to the erosion of intangible heritage, from indigenous irrigation practices to artisanal techniques in argan oil production. These losses are often invisible in climate accounting, yet they represent a profound form of displacement, one of identity and knowledge rather than population alone.
Researchers estimate that fewer than 100 active whistlers remain in Azilal today, most of them men over the age of 50. Younger generations, drawn to urban jobs or modern education, have limited exposure to the language and few incentives to preserve it. “It’s not just sound,” said one local elder in a community interview recorded by France 24. “It is how we survived before roads, before signals, before electricity.” For the few remaining families in the highlands, teaching the whistles has become both an act of resistance and remembrance, a way to anchor their existence in a rapidly changing landscape.
Morocco’s Ministry of Culture has initiated documentation efforts under the country’s intangible heritage programme, modelled after UNESCO’s framework for safeguarding endangered languages. But conservation faces practical constraints. Without economic incentives to remain in the highlands, cultural preservation competes with livelihood pressures. Drought, which has intensified since 2019, continues to drive rural-urban migration, while limited public investment in mountain infrastructure has left many communities without viable alternatives to relocation.
The disappearance of the whistled language also underscores how climate vulnerability intersects with cultural diversity. Linguists note that acoustic adaptations like whistled speech often emerge in ecologically distinct settings; dense forests, deep valleys, or highlands, where geography shapes communication. In parts of Turkey, Mexico, and the Canary Islands, similar languages evolved and are now preserved through community-led tourism and education initiatives. In the Atlas Mountains, however, such support remains minimal, despite the language’s potential to draw academic interest and eco-cultural tourism to the region.
The Azilal story is a microcosm of how environmental degradation dismantles social infrastructure. The same deforestation and overgrazing that reduce pastureland also disrupt the acoustic landscapes that make whistled communication possible. The same migration that empties villages of herders also empties them of oral knowledge systems that encoded generations of ecological understanding, from animal behaviour to seasonal change. As Morocco invests heavily in renewable energy, agriculture, and coastal resilience, the inland highlands remain a reminder that sustainability must also include cultural continuity.
There are small signs of revival. Some NGOs, working with Amazigh cultural associations, have begun recording the whistles and mapping their usage, hoping to integrate the practice into local school curricula or digital archives. In 2024, a regional heritage initiative funded by the Moroccan government launched a pilot project to document endangered oral traditions in the Atlas region, with Azilal’s whistled language among its top priorities. Yet without living communities to sustain it, documentation may only preserve memory, not practice.
The struggle to save Azilal’s whistled speech is thus not just about sound but about survival in a changing climate. It captures the tension between modernization and tradition, between adaptation and loss. As Morocco pursues its national climate strategy, aiming to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 45.5% by 2030, the challenge will be to ensure that cultural ecosystems are not casualties of environmental progress. For the remaining whistlers guiding their herds through the valleys, each note blown across the wind is not just a call to animals, but a message to the future: that sustainability must remember the voices it risks leaving behind.
