Dress, jewellery and language

According to syntheses based notably on Cynthia Becker, men wore a white wool cloak (asilham), a striped djellaba and a white muslin turban (tikarzit); beard and turban were the marks of the adult man.

Women wore a triangular headdress (tabugst), silver jewellery with triangular motifs, large amber beads and indigo-dyed veils specific to each sub-group, hence the nickname “blue women” given by the ethnographer Jean Besancenot. An amber necklace attributed to the Aït Atta is kept at the Musée Salies.

Hart (1984, p. 85) confirms the essentials for the 1960s, with one difference. Men wear a turban of four metres of white muslin (tikarzit); before the “pacification” it was the tabakshiut, of wool or felt and half as long; the turban and the beard, and formerly the rifle, are the marks of a man, and many still carry a curved dagger (tuzzalt). But where the synthesis speaks of a white woollen cloak, Hart describes a black sleeveless burnous worn over a long white shirt, with baggy trousers and leather sandals. For women he describes the triangular headdress (tabugst) adorned with green cords and silver jewellery, a necklace of large amber beads, a woollen blanket (ahandir) whose design differs by clan, and beneath it an indigo cotton sheet fastened at the shoulder with a silver clasp and tied with a woollen belt; women's trousers are, in his view, a post-“pacification” innovation.

The Aït Atta speak a variety of Central Moroccan Tamazight. Hart notes the persistence, in the Igharm Amazdar qânûn, of Amazigh terms that had become archaic.