37.3010, Reviews: Language Policy and Planning of Amazigh Languages in Morocco: Kefan Bao (2026)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3010. Fri Sep 18 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3010, Reviews: Language Policy and Planning of Amazigh Languages in Morocco: Kefan Bao (2026)

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Date: 18-Sep-2026
From: Silja Ijas [silja.ijas at gmail.com]
Subject: Discourse Analysis: Kefan Bao (2026)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/37-160

Title: Language Policy and Planning of Amazigh Languages in Morocco
Subtitle: A Study of the Language Ideology of the Royal Institute of
Amazigh Culture (IRCAM)
Series Title: LOT Dissertation Series
Publication Year: 2026

Publisher: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke
(LOT)
           http://www.lotpublications.nl/
Book URL: https://dx.medra.org/10.48273/LOT0706

Author(s): Kefan Bao

Reviewer: Silja Ijas

SUMMARY
Kefan Bao discusses the formation of the official language policy and
planning (LPP) toward Amazigh languages in Morocco and the ideologies
behind these policy measures in his 2026 book Language Policy and
Planning of Amazigh Languages in Morocco: A Study of the Language
Ideology of the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture (IRCAM). The main
discussion revolves around the tension between the requirements and
goals assigned to the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture (IRCAM) by
the state and the actual sociolinguistic practices of Amazigh speakers
and how IRCAM navigates this tension in its LPP. Bao’s book is cited
in this review with references to page numbers in brackets only in the
format “(p. xx)” or “(pp. xx–yy)”. I follow the author's model in
referring to the language varieties under scrutiny as Amazigh and not
as Berber.
The volume promises to present “a case where politically driven
planning efforts are not primarily shaped by the agency of speakers
but by state considerations” (p. 20) and thus it “explores how such
political needs triggered a post-naturalist language ideology, which
Kathryn A. Woolard refers to as ‘project authenticity’, leading to a
series of planning efforts that are significantly detached from the
actual language practices of speakers and are difficult to interpret
through traditional language ideologies” (p. 20). More specific
research questions are not mentioned. The book seems to be an unedited
publication of Bao’s doctoral PhD dissertation (the research is
referred to as ‘thesis’ within the text); however, in this review, the
book is reviewed as an academic publication, not as a doctoral
dissertation.
Chapter 1 ‘Introduction’ discusses the theoretical background,
methodology and the aims of the research. It discusses the concept of
language ideologies, focusing especially on the ideologies of standard
language and one nation–one language, through short concrete examples
from Italy/Accademia della Crusca, France/Académie française, and
Germany/Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft; it discusses how the ideologies
manifested in these cases have influenced language policies and
ideologies in the Arab world. It further gives a short review on the
sociolinguistic situation of Morocco and what kind of LPP has been
directed at the Amazigh languages.
Chapter 2 ‘A brief history of the Amazigh cultural-political movement’
and Chapter 3 ‘Founding ideologies of IRCAM and its activities in the
formative years’ give the historical context for the research. Chapter
2 discusses the historic development of Amazigh LPP in Morocco until
the Arab spring, which led Amazigh to gain the constitutional status
of an official language of Morocco. Chapter 3 explores the personal
history of Mohamed Chafik (the first rector of IRCAM) and how his
views and ideas about Amazigh languages, or rather, the Amazigh
language in singular form, have formed through his education and life
experiences, and, on the other hand, how his ideology has affected the
formation of IRCAM and the goals and purposes it has been given.
Chapter 4 ‘“Moroccan Amazigh”: A central concept in IRCAM’s language
ideology’, Chapter 5 ‘The “death” and “revitalization” of the Amazigh
language in Ahmed Boukous’s language ideology’, and Chapter 6
‘Understanding the polynomic approach in IRCAM’s language planning’
provide discussion and develop the argument of the research. Chapter 4
explains the ideological and practical development of Standard
Moroccan Amazigh and argues it is mainly an ideological concept, since
it manifests itself in the Tifinagh-IRCAM script and spelling rules,
while school children are primarily taught the three main varieties of
Amazigh spoken in Morocco. Chapter 5 discusses the idea held by
Boukous (the current chair of IRCAM) that Amazigh’s endangerment is
due to its “dialectalization”, including numerous borrowings from
Arabic in the different Amazigh varieties, and language attrition in
both in its narrow sense (individual level) and broad sense (societal
level, i.e. language shift). These ideas are argued to be ideological.
Chapter 6 examines how the polynomic approach to language planning is
adopted and redefined in IRCAM’s language planning and how
plurinormalist language teaching principles are applied in Amazigh
education. The chapter argues that polynomic and plurinormalist
approaches are used to bring together the ideological principles of
IRCAM and the actual language practices of Amazigh language
communities.
Chapter 7 ‘Conclusions’ first summarizes the historical
contextualization and discussion presented in previous chapters and
then introduces the final argument by stating that IRCAM’s LPP is
based on a post-naturalist ideology or project authenticity, which
tries to shift both the concepts of ‘Amazigh is language from
anywhere’ (the pan-Amazigh movement across state borders) and ‘Amazigh
is language from somewhere’ (the local varieties of Amazigh) to anchor
both within the state of Morocco through the development of Standard
Moroccan Amazigh.
EVALUATION
The book offers a comprehensive view of the historical development of
the LPP in Morocco toward Amazigh languages and about the ideological
environment in which the policies were formed. Many of the old,
“traditional” language academies are hundreds of years old but it
seems that the same ideas and ideologies still work in the background.
IRCAM is a fairly recently (2001) established language academy and
examining what kind of practices it has adopted into its LPP, and why,
is of interest, as is the question of how to navigate the LPP in a
situation in which different interest groups (state, researchers,
teachers, speaker communities) interests collide. Specifically, it
discusses the challenges, and (ideological) choices that are to be
made when a standard language is developed from scratch: which
variety/varieties should be the base of the grammar and vocabulary,
how to select the lexicon and what kind of implications this selection
might have, what kind of stance to take toward lexical and
phraseological borrowing, and so on. The research synthesizes the
historical development of Amazigh LPP in Morocco and IRCAM’s role
within it, and discusses how ideologies manifest in the formation and
implementation of this LPP. While this synthesis is original, the book
does not develop a new argument or theory and cannot be claimed as
highly novel or groundbreaking.
The book does not explicitly describe its intended audience. Given its
unedited dissertation format and its reliance on specialized
terminology partially without detailed explanation of such terms, the
book seems best suited to graduate students and researchers already
familiar with LPP and sociolinguistics, rather than to undergraduate
students or readers new to the field. The book is written in English,
but as Morocco used to be a French colony, it is unsurprising that
many of the sources cited are written in French. The French reference
material is directly quoted on several occasions and while a few of
the quotes are translated into English, to my surprise, the majority
are provided without translations. While my French is sufficient for
me to read and understand the untranslated quotes, all readers of this
book might not be able to do so. Thus, the reader needs to be fluent
in both English and French to follow the development of the author’s
argument.
The methodology is the weakest part of the book. It is not explicitly
stated to which field of science the book positions itself, but as it
discusses LPP, it is most likely a sociolinguistic study. The stated
research method is critical discourse analysis (CDA), except the
‘critical’ is redefined as “meticulous examination of the concepts
contained within the discourse of IRCAM” and further “these
conceptions will be scrutinized within their context and will not be
left unquestioned based solely on their literal, general, or intuitive
interpretations. [...] the thesis aims to provide a critical or
analytical description of the language ideologies of IRCAM, rather
than adopting a prescriptive stance” (p. 31). However, “while some
scholars argue that CDA should propose changes and suggest corrections
to specific discourses, this thesis deliberately avoids that approach”
(p. 31).
The problem with applying CDA in this book, is that CDA is not a
research method but an approach to critically examine power and
ideology in society and explain how discourses perpetuate social
inequalities. The actual methods used and further approaches taken
within this framework depend on the discipline (see e.g. Barakos 2016
and Williams 2020 on language planning and policy; Holmes 2014 in
sociolinguistics; Lin 2014 on applied linguistics; Mullet 2018 on
educational research). The author’s adapted method of using “critical”
as a free pass to interpret the texts in other ways than “literal,
general, or intuitive” is difficult to perceive as a stable scientific
method. In practice, this means the author can stretch the meaning of
the source text to fit their argument and make speculative claims
about the writers’ “true” intentions outside of what has been
literally written; I will provide an example of this  below (critique
on how the data has been analysed in Chapter 5). Thus, it remains
quite unclear how the research results were actually reached.
Adding to this methodological vagueness, the book never clearly
defines a research question against which the analysis could be
evaluated. The introduction promises to examine “how such political
needs triggered a post-naturalist language ideology” (p. 20), but even
if this concept is introduced as a central concept to the analytical
framework, it is abandoned in the subsequent chapters, except that it
is finally revisited in the second half of the conclusions, where the
author explains its theoretical meaning in more detail and interprets
the results through this framework. Introducing new theory in
conclusions is quite unconventional, and a better solution from the
reader’s point of view is to explain the theory in the introduction
and then develop and build the argument in each of the discussion
chapters instead. In this book, instead of the post-naturalist
language ideology, IRCAM’s LPP is most often discussed in terms of
traditional ideologies (standardization and one language-one nation),
despite the author’s claim in the introduction that it is “difficult
to interpret” (p. 20) through these frameworks. While the discussion
looks at the results from a novel and intriguing point of view, the
discussion stays quite short, less than four pages. In this way, the
book fulfils its promise to present how IRCAM’s LPP is primarily
driven by state ideologies and is therefore detached from the actual
language practices.
The analysis is based on data in the form of publications published
primarily by IRCAM or its representatives and the author’s own reading
of them. Based on the “accessed on” dates of some web sources, the
author has been writing the book at least until the late autumn 2024.
However, the sources cited are generally significantly older; about
80% are 10 years old, published before 2016, and 60% are 20 years old,
published before 2006. While this is not a problem when presenting the
historic background of the research, the primary sources used as the
basis of the argument about IRCAM’s ideologies are over 20 years old
(published between 2003–2005) and the textbooks used to analyse how
the ideologies are manifested in practice are 9 to 17 years old
(published between 2004–2017). The author notes that he is also
“monitoring shifts and developments in its ideologies over time” (p.
32), but the discussion assumes that the conclusions drawn from data
10 to 20 years old are still valid. This raises the question whether
anything has changed since these data have appeared, and whether the
IRCAM’s LPP has developed since.
The author’s undisclosed positionality toward IRCAM’s LPP raises
questions about the objectivity of the analysis. Although he documents
a personal connection to the country as well as a long-lasting
interest in the history and the languages of the region, he does not
state his position explicitly nor estimate to what extent his personal
objections to IRCAM’s stance have affected his analysis and
interpretation. There is some evidence to support a charge of author
bias against IRCAM. For instance, IRCAM’s stance is that the Amazigh
varieties spoken in Morocco are dialects, not independent languages,
and thus can be standardized into Standard Moroccan Amazigh. The
author, on the other hand, takes them as separate languages, as the
title of the book suggests, and as he explicitly states (pp. 22–23).
The author also asserts, in general terms, that IRCAM’s standard
Moroccan Amazigh has an inherent problem of acceptance among the
Amazigh speakers and its general implementation leads to a new
diglossic situation, “widely deemed undesirable” (p. 33). However, the
only evidence of such disapproval is a cited interview with a language
teacher, who struggled to teach the contents of the textbook with the
polynomic approach (pp. 117–118). Furthermore, the actions of IRCAM
are deemed to be based on a change in language ideology as if it was a
demerit and there is a negative evaluative undertone when describing
the LPP IRCAM promotes. For instance, the author deems IRCAM’s LPP
toward Arabic loanwords “hostile” (p. 50) because the majority of them
have been excluded from IRCAM’s dictionaries and been replaced with
Amazigh derivations. Perhaps a more neutral reading of this would be
to view it as Ausbau planning or dimensioning of difference between
languages (Kloss 1967) or Language-making (Krämer et al. 2022), not as
hostility.
The partiality is especially visible in Chapter 5, where the concepts
of language death, endangerment, and revitalization are discussed. The
author does not seem to agree with the idea held by Ahmed Boukous
(IRCAM’s long-time chair) that Amazigh is becoming an endangered
language. The first problem here is that the author does not discuss
how the concept of language endangerment is understood within this
research. It seems language endangerment is taken in the book as a
dichotomy of vital/dead whereas the theory of language endangerment
views endangerment as a continuum and its degree can be measured, e.g.
through Fishman’s GIDS (Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale)
(1991), or its expanded version by Lewis & Simons (2010), or UNESCO’s
(United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization)
Language Vitality Assessment (Brenzinger et al. 2003). It naturally
follows that a language does not need to be dead or moribund or even
severely endangered before planning and implementing revitalization
measures for the language. This is also the way Boukous understands
and uses these terms (based on Boukous 2011).
This difference in the way that language endangerment is understood in
the research vs. in the source literature seems to lead to major
misinterpretations of source texts. Boukous’s stance is that Amazigh
is a minoritized language (despite its great numbers of speakers) in
the process of endangerment, and its use domains will become narrower
if no preventive action is taken (Boukous 2011). Boukous suggests
creating a standard Amazigh as one of these measures, giving three
suggestions: Pan-Amazigh (i.e. common Amazigh or “Amazigh coined”),
geo-lect (creating several standards or Regional Amazigh), and lect
(creating even more standards for the local dialects) (Boukous 2011:
231–233). Standardization through three geo-lects (Central Atlas
Tamazight, Tarifit, and Tashelhiyt) is the approach IRCAM has adopted.
The author, however, seems to interpret language endangerment and
revitalization through the dichotomy of vital/dead, in which only
moribund/dead languages can be revitalized, and appears to claim that
standard Amazigh is the target of revitalization, not one of the ways
to revitalize the Amazigh languages.
This misinterpretation can be seen in Chapter 5, where the author
summarizes some literature dealing with language
death/endangerment/revitalization (pp. 125–129) and then concludes
“[...] when Boukous attempts to place Amazigh within the framework of
language revitalization, he still believes that Amazigh retains
vitality but is only perceived endangered” (p. 129). Throughout the
book, the author mentions ‘“the death” of Amazigh’, a term allegedly
used by Boukous, and claims that Boukous believes that even though a
single unified Amazigh language has never existed, this imagined
language variety can be deemed “dead” and the target of
“revitalization” (p. 133). The author quotes Boukous profusely but
interprets the quotes in an inconsistent manner; for instance, first
he notes that “[...] Boukous, when discussing the revitalization of
Amazigh, does not necessarily believe that the language is on the
brink of losing its speakers” (p. 130), but again on page 131 seems to
assume that Boukous discusses language death (solely) in the context
of Amazigh: “[...] the discourse on language death presented at the
beginning of Revitalization [(Boukous 2011)] seems difficult to align
with the actual situation of the Amazigh language”.
Therefore, I checked these specific claims against Boukous (2011), the
book the author quotes extensively in this chapter. “The discourse on
language death presented” at the beginning of Boukous (2011) is
intended to introduce the general topic of language loss and death to
the reader. Boukous does not claim Amazigh is a dead language, or even
moribund; on the contrary, he states at the very beginning of the book
that “the process of minoritization of the Amazigh language has led to
the current situation, in which the language is endangered in the
medium term” (Boukous 2011: 16). He also discusses the potential event
of language death: “The process of linguistic substitution to which
Amazigh is subjected objectively leads to language death after the
fourth generation” (Boukous 2011: 112), but notes it can be avoided
with the ongoing interventive measures: “Can this fatal result be
foiled by the implementation of a proactive program for the
maintenance of Amazigh [...]? [...] It certainly can, provided that
Amazigh is integrated into a revitalization strategy which is
conceived and implemented at the institutional level and in which the
Amazighophone community is seriously involved” (Boukous 2011: 115).
Misrepresenting and overinterpreting Boukous’s work like this is
difficult to see just as “critical analysis” and it undermines the
research’s credibility.
The sociolinguistic situations of languages change constantly, e.g. as
a result of increased urbanization, which is also mentioned as one of
the reasons for Amazigh speakers’ language shift (pp. 127–128; pp.
143–146; Boukous 2011: 103–104). Boukous presents evidence for his
claims, for instance that urban children perform worse on the Amazigh
test(s) than their rural counterparts (Boukous 2011: 84–100), but the
author is not convinced and refutes Boukous’s interpretation as
ideology (p. 145). However, the author does not present the evidence
to support the opposite claim. He backs some foundational assumptions
about the sociolinguistic situation of Amazigh languages with nothing
more than unsupported general statements, such as, the status of
Amazigh “as a mother tongue and an important means of communication
remains largely unchanged” and thus “we can safely assume” that views
on Amazigh language endangerment are not related to change in language
practices but are ideological (p. 1), or that the officially reported
decline in the number of Amazigh speakers does not reflect reality and
just because the absolute number of Amazigh speakers is high (p. 22)
the language can be assumed to be vital. The evidence for these claims
is not given or discussed further, and the author’s position stands in
contrast to vitality assessments from outside IRCAM as well: For
instance, according to Ethnologue, Central Atlas Tamazight is already
classified as endangered while Tarifit and Tashelhiyt are stable
(Ethnologue 2026a; Ethnologue 2026b; Ethnologue 2026c).
Finally, the production quality (layout and typesetting) of the book
could be improved. While the typeface remains consistent throughout
the book, the font color is inconsistent, alternating between black
and grey—sometimes from paragraph to paragraph, sometimes on word and
phrase level—which is distracting, as the black text visually stands
out against the grey. In addition, Chapters 5 and 6, as well as the
References section, do not begin on a new page but continue directly
from the end of the preceding section.
______________
Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic) was used for assistance with grammar,
clarity, and style in this review. It was also used to identify
discipline-specific papers on CDA methodology, and to check direct
quotations from Boukous (2011) against the original text. The sources
and quotations cited here were manually selected and verified by the
reviewer.
REFERENCES
Barakos, Elisabeth. 2016. Language Policy and Critical Discourse
Studies: Toward a Combined Approach. In Barakos, Elisabeth & Unger,
Johann W. (eds.), Discursive Approaches to Language Policy, 23–49.
London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. (doi: 10.1057/978-1-137-53134-6_2)
Boukous, Ahmed. 2011. Revitalizing the Amazigh Language: Stakes,
Challenges, and Strategies (Traduction 24). Rabat: l’Institut Royal de
la Culture Amazighe. (Trans. Bensoukas, Karim.)
Brenzinger, Matthias & Yamamoto, Akira & Aikawa, Noriko & Koundiouba,
Dimitri & Minasyan, Anahit & Dwyer, Arienne M. & Smeets, Rieks (eds.).
2003. Language Vitality and Endangerment. Paris: UNESCO Intangible
Cultural Unit, Safeguarding Endangered Languages.
(https://ich.unesco.org/doc/src/00120-EN.pdf)
Ethnologue. 2026a. Central Atlas Tamazight (free page).
​​https://www.ethnologue.com/language/tzm/ (Accessed June 18, 2026.)
Ethnologue. 2026b. Tarifit (free page).
https://www.ethnologue.com/language/rif/ (Accessed June 18, 2026.)
Ethnologue. 2026c. Tashelhiyt (free page).
https://www.ethnologue.com/language/shi/ (Accessed June 18, 2026.)
Fishman, Joshua A. 1991. Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and
Empirical  Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages
(Multilingual Matters 76). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Holmes, Janet. 2014. Doing Discourse Analysis in Sociolinguistics. In
Holmes, Janet & Hazen, Kirk (eds.), Research Methods in
Sociolinguistics: A Practical Guide (Guides to Research Methods in
Language and Linguistics 5), 177–193. West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell.
Kloss, Heinz. 1967. “Abstand Languages” and “Ausbau Languages.”
Anthropological Linguistics 9(7). 29–41.
(http://www.jstor.org/stable/30029461)
Krämer, Philipp & Vogl, Ulrike & Kolehmainen, Leena. 2022. What is
“Language Making”? International Journal of the Sociology of Language
274. 1–27. (doi: 10.1515/ijsl-2021-0016)
Lewis, M. Paul & Simons, Gary F. 2010. Assessing endangerment:
Expanding Fishman’s GIDS. Revue roumaine de linguistique LV(4).
103–120. (https://www.lingv.ro/RRL%202%202010%20art01Lewis.pdf)
Lin, Angel. 2014. Critical Discourse Analysis in Applied Linguistics:
A Methodological Review. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 34.
213–232. (doi: 10.1017/S0267190514000087)
Mullet, Dianna R. 2018. A General Critical Discourse Analysis
Framework for Educational Research. Journal of Advanced Academics 29.
116–142.
Williams, Emily A.E. 2020. Critical Discourse Analysis for Language
Policy and Planning. In Friginal, Eric & Hardy, Jack A. (eds.), The
Routledge Handbook of Corpus Approaches to Discourse Analysis,
481–498. 1st edn. Routledge.
(https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780429522154) (Accessed June 23,
2026.)
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Silja Ijas is a postdoctoral researcher at Hokkaido University
Research Faculty of Media and Communication specializing in the Ainu
language. Her sociolinguistic research focuses on different aspects of
language policy toward minoritized and marginalized languages:
language revitalization, language learning and teaching methods, as
well as neologisms. More recently, she has focused on lexicography and
translation of minoritized languages.



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