Even though Amazigh languages are known to have one of the oldest writing scripts attested (Tifinagh), Tarifit has been historically mainly an oral language. Only recently have been there attempts to incorporate the teaching of Amazigh language at schools in Morocco, but that is still far from being uniform and fully implemented. On social media, people usually use Latin script to communicate with each other, the use of the Arabic script is observed but to a lesser extent. There is huge variation in how people communicate. For example, a word such as 'attas' (meaning a lot) can be produced as 'attas', 'atas', attaas', or even in the abbreviated form 'ats'. In this project, we closely explore this huge variation by building and analyzing a written community-oriented corpus filled by native speakers of the language. In this project, we explore the intricacies and implications of this variation for sociolinguistic and phonological theory.

Amazigh languages and Darija (Moroccan Arabic) have been in contact for over a millennium. In Morocco, every citizen speaks Darija, even Amazigh speakers, but the opposite is not necessarily true.  This long interaction between these non-directly related languages has allowed for a lively exchange of features and properties. For instance, it has been established that Amazigh languages have transmitted labialization, vowel reduction and centralization, opposite examples include the transmission of more pharyngeals and laryngeals from Darija to Amazigh languages. In this line of research, we opt for an empirical approach that has been lacking in the few traditional descriptions of this contact, in order to to establish how these two languages affect each other, both at the individual and societal levels of bilingualism, providing insightful perspectives to our understanding on the topic. Most recent work on this includes the transfer of vowelessness from Amazigh to Darija.

Tarifit presents a handful of interesting linguistic characteristics. For instance, an ongoing sound change within the language is being attested where the realization of coda /r/ is optional when preceded by the full vowel /a/. Other example cases include the deletion of schwa leading to vowelessness, nasal coarticulation and /q/ preaspiration. For all these cases, we track both the phonetic mechanisms and sociolinguistic variation behind these features.