Lisan al-Gharbi (Arabic for "Western dialect") is the name given to an extinct dialect of Berber that was spoken over much of the Atlantic plains of

Morocco Morocco (),, ) officially the Kingdom of Morocco, is the westernmost country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It overlooks the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and has land borders with Algeria t ...

.B. Frankel
History in Dispute: The Middle East since 1945. First series
(St. James Press, 2003), p.206Awal, Numéros 19 à 21
(Maison des sciences de l'homme, 1999), p.157 It was closely related to

Tashelhit , now more usually known as Tashelhit , is a Berber language spoken in southwestern Morocco. The endonym is , and in recent English publications the name of the language is often rendered ''Tashelhit'', ''Tashelhiyt'' or ''Tashlhiyt''. In Moroc ...

. The Lisan al-Gharbi was the official language of the Barghawata Confederacy, and the idiom used in

Salih ibn Tarif Ṣāliḥ ibn Tarīf (Arabic: صالح بن طريف) was the second king of the Berghouata kingdom, the prophet of a new Judeo-Christian religion, and the eponymous ancestor of the Oulad Salah tribe of Morocco. He appeared during the caliphate of ...

's "indigenous Qur'an". The Barghawata's defeat by Almoravids in the 11th century, the settlement of several Arab and Zenata tribes in the area by

Almohads The Almohad Caliphate (; ar, خِلَافَةُ ٱلْمُوَحِّدِينَ or or from ar, ٱلْمُوَحِّدُونَ, translit=al-Muwaḥḥidūn, lit=those who profess the unity of God) was a North African Berber Muslim empire f ...

and

Marinids The Marinid Sultanate was a Berber Muslim empire from the mid-13th to the 15th century which controlled present-day Morocco and, intermittently, other parts of North Africa (Algeria and Tunisia) and of the southern Iberian Peninsula (Spain) ar ...

, the Portuguese invasion in the 15th century, several famines and the resulting displacement of populations made the Masmouda minoritary while Arabic became the dominant language; that led to the Arabization of the remaining Masmouda population and the extinction of the Lisan al-Gharbi. Nowadays, several tribes and sub-tribes of Masmouda descent are still found among the

Doukkala Doukkala () is a tribal confederation of mostly Arab origin, and is also a natural region of Morocco made of fertile plains and forests. Nowadays it is part of the Casablanca-Settat administrative region. The region is a plain stretching fr ...

, the Chaouia, the Zaër and the

Regraga The Regraga are a sub-tribe of the Masmuda Berber tribal confederacy. They are also one of three tribes that formed the population of Essaouira, Morocco. The Regraga came from the Jbel Hadid mountains and introduced Islam to the region; the oth ...

. However, they are all Arabophone; the only Berber-speaking Masmouda ethnic group to be found in the Atlantic plains is the Hahha confederacy, but no direct filiation link had been established between their dialect (belonging to

) and the Lisan al-Gharbi.

References

Berber languages Berbers in Morocco Extinct languages of Africa Languages of Morocco {{Berber-lang-stub