Shilha language
Berber language of southwestern Morocco
Tashelhiyt or Tachelhit ( TASH-əl-hit; from the endonym Taclḥiyt, IPA: [tæʃlħijt]), also known as Shilha ( SHIL-hə; from its name in Moroccan Arabic, Šəlḥa) is a Berber language spoken in southern Morocco by the Shilha people. When referring to the language, anthropologists and historians prefer the name Shilha, which is in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Linguists writing in English prefer Tashelhit (or a variant spelling). In French sources the language is called tachelhit, chelha or chleuh.
As of the 2024 Moroccan census, Shilha is spoken by 14.2% of the population, or approximately 5.2 million people. The area comprises the western part of the High Atlas mountains and the regions to the south up to the Draa River, including the Anti-Atlas and the alluvial basin of the Sous River. The largest urban centres in the area are the coastal city of Agadir (population over 400,000) and the towns of Guelmim, Taroudant, Oulad Teima, Tiznit and Ouarzazate.
In the north and to the south, Shilha borders Arabic-speaking areas. In the northeast, roughly along the line Demnate-Zagora, there is a dialect continuum with Central Atlas Tamazight. Within the Shilha-speaking area, there are several Arabic-speaking enclaves, notably the town of Taroudant and its surroundings.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Shilha language” as berber language of southwestern Morocco. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q34152. The Library of Congress control number is sh85121439. Authority coordinates are 31.000, -7.100. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “Shilha language” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.