Aicha Bouhjar

Also published as: Aïcha Bouhjar


2010

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For Standardised Amazigh Linguistic Resources
Youssef Aït Ouguengay | Aïcha Bouhjar
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)

Amazigh language and culture may well be viewed to have known an unprecedented booming in Morocco : more than a hundred- which are published by the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture (IRCAM), an institution created in 2001 to preserve, promote and endorse Amazigh culture in all its dimensions. Crucially, publications in the Amazigh language would not have seen light without the valiant attempts to upgrade the language on the linguistic and technological levels. The central thrust of this contribution is to provide a vista about the whole range of actions carried out by IRCAM. Of prime utility to this presentation is what was accomplished to supply Amazigh with the necessary tools and corpora without which the Amazigh language would emphatically fail to have a place in the world of NITCs. After a brief description of the prime specificities that characterise the standardisation of Amazigh in Morocco, a retrospective on the basic computer tools now available for the processing of Amazigh will be set out. It is concluded that the homogenisation of a considerable number of corpora should, by right, be viewed as a strategic move and an incontrovertible prerequisite to the computerisation of Amazigh,

2008

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Amazigh Language Terminology in Morocco or Management of a “Multidimensional” Variation
Aicha Bouhjar
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)

The present communication brings to the fore the work undertaken at the Royal Institute of the Amazigh Culture (IRCAM, henceforth) within the Language Planning Center known as “Centre de l’Aménagement Linguistique” (CAL) within the framework of the language planning of Amazigh, particularly on the side of terminology. The focus will be on the concept of “variation” that affects different levels in the course of standardizing a language: orthography, spelling, grammar and lexis. Thus, after a brief survey of the main features of the Amazigh (Berber) language in general, the missions and the projects far achieved by CAL will be presented, particularly the objectives that relate to the work on the multiply varied corpus-based terminology. It appears that eliciting the pertinent information, for the most part, requires a whole amount of work on the re-writing of corpora so that the latter become exploitable in the standardization process. It should be pointed out that this stage of data homogenization, seemingly unwieldy for optimal exploitation, cannot be undertaken Amazighist linguists being involved in theoretical and methodological presuppositions that are at the root of this variation.