Amazigh, Tidikelt

The Tidikelt Berbers are the Berber-speaking people of the Tidikelt, the oases around In Salah, Aoulef, Tit, Akabli and In Ghar south of the Tademaït plateau in the central Algerian Sahara. Their language, Tidikelt Tamazight (also called Tidikelt-Tuat Berber), is a Zenati Berber language of the Mzab-Wargla group with two dialects, Tidikelt and Tit. The region has been largely Arabised in language and culture over the centuries, and the language is moribund: Ethnologue counted about 1,000 speakers in 2011, all elderly, and a documentation project in 2022-2024 recorded the elders who still speak it. The community still keeps much of its Berber tradition, and its members are known locally as the Berbers of In Salah. Oasis society was ranked: Chorfa and Mrabtin lineages, free cultivators, and Haratin sharecroppers. The Tidikelt Berbers are distinct from the Zenete of the Gourara and the Touat to the northwest and from the Tuareg herders who come to In Salah from the Hoggar.

Life turns on the oasis: some 28 palm groves with about 250,000 date palms, watered by foggaras, underground channels whose flow is shared by measured rights, with fruit trees and grain beneath the palms and Ovis longipes sheep. Tales, songs, dances, riddles and poems in Tidikelt Berber are still known by elders and were recorded in 2022-2024, together with accounts of weddings, funerals, farming, cosmology and belief. Descent is through the father; weddings and funerals are large community events; houses and ksour are of earth brick.

Sunni Islam of the Maliki school, practised through mosques, Quranic schools, zawiyas and saints' tombs with annual pilgrimages, as across the Tidikelt and Touat. Elders' accounts recorded in 2022-2024 include beliefs and cosmology older than the oases' Islamic scholarship. No Christian community is known.

No Scripture, Jesus Film or audio recordings exist in Tidikelt Tamazight. Everyone also speaks Algerian Arabic, so Arabic Bibles, the Jesus Film in Arabic and Arabic media are usable. No church or believer is known among the Tidikelt Berbers.

A foggara is an underground channel that collects groundwater from the Continental Intercalary aquifer and carries it by gravity to the palm gardens, with access shafts every 20-30 m. Galleries average about 2.5 km and some reach 14 km. At the garden edge a comb-shaped divider splits the flow among owners in proportion to their measured shares, overseen by a water measurer (kayal) and the village assembly. Of some 2,000 foggaras recorded across the Gourara, Touat and Tidikelt, a few hundred still flow; motor pumps that lower the water table and the loss of the labour and knowledge needed to clean the galleries are drying the rest.