by Warda Belkass
There is a word in Tachlhit, my mother tongue, one of the three main varieties of Amazigh (Berber) spoken in Morocco, that I kept returning to while building my project Asafar; this word is Awal. It means spoken language. But in Amazigh, language is never just communication. It is memory, presence, and claim. A claim to exist in a space.
I didn’t arrive at human rights through a textbook. I arrived through a series of events, one of which was a diagnosis. In 2018, I was diagnosed with celiac disease, a chronic condition that brings with it, for many people, periods of depression and high anxiety. Living with it was one thing. Explaining it was another, especially to my mother, who speaks only Tachlhit. When I tried to translate concepts like “burnout” or “anxiety disorder” into our language, I found they didn’t have clean equivalents. While Tachlhit possesses rich ways of expressing emotional experience, it has had fewer opportunities to develop standardized terminology within modern psychological and medical frameworks; in clinics, in public health campaigns, or in the digital world. For generations, Amazigh languages were largely excluded from formal education, public administration, healthcare communication, and much of the digital sphere, limiting opportunities for specialized vocabularies to develop and circulate. That absence, which I came to understand, is not accidental. It is structural. And it is a human rights issue.
Access to information in your own language is not a cultural luxury. It is a right!
The right to health, enshrined in international human rights law, is hollow if the information that supports it is only available in languages you don’t speak. The same applies to legal information, to public services, to digital platforms. When a language is absent from these spaces, the people who speak it are, in effect, excluded from them. Not by intention, always. But by design. The effects of linguistic marginalization rarely stay confined to language itself. The initial harm, the exclusion of a language from official or institutional spaces, doesn’t stay contained. It seems to reverberate into other areas. Into mental health, where stigma grows when emotional vocabulary has no culturally grounded form. Into cultural heritage, which risks becoming a museum piece rather than a living resource, something kept behind glass rather than used to think, heal, and build. Into the digital world, where platforms quietly decide what is visible and what is searchable, and where contributing content in Amazigh about psychology or human rights is, in a small but real way, an act of occupation. In this sense, human rights are never abstract for long. They land somewhere specific, in a clinic waiting room, in a WhatsApp voice note, in the question of whether your mother can hear herself in a conversation about her own wellbeing.
Cultural heritage as a living resource, not a preservation project
One of the things I resisted throughout my work on Asafar was the idea that Amazigh language and culture exist primarily to be preserved; as if they belong to the past, and our job is simply to protect them from dying and disappearing. That framing, however well-intentioned, quietly reduces a living tradition to an artifact. What I found instead, working to translate mental health concepts into Tachlhit, is that the language has enormous generative capacity. It has metaphors for emotional turbulence. It has rhythms for talking about the body. It has ways of making sense of suffering that are neither clinical nor borrowed. The work was not just to preserve these; it was to bring them into new spaces. Into YouTube. Into conversations about anxiety and burnout. Into a dialogue with human rights frameworks that had, until recently, rarely made room for them.
That is a different project than preservation. It is expansion. And it requires that we understand linguistic rights not only as protection against loss, but as the right to grow, adapt, and participate, in health systems, in legal structures, in digital life. The right to show up fully and bring back our ancestral ways of living into our modern zeitgeist.
Why this matters for the law
Lars’s project begins with a conviction I find compelling: that access to the law should not be a privilege. That legal assistance is not a luxury but a structural necessity. My only addition would be that access to the law is also a linguistic question.
People navigate legal systems in languages that may not be theirs. They sign documents they cannot fully read. They access rights — or fail to — through frameworks built in languages that carry specific cultural and historical assumptions. A legal system that is genuinely open to everyone must reckon with language not as a footnote, but as a condition of access. My mother speaks only Amazigh. She is not exceptional in this. Millions of people globally encounter institutions, whether legal, medical, digital, that were not built with their language in mind. Closing that gap is not simply a matter of translation. It is a matter of recognition: that the language someone speaks is not incidental to their humanity, but central to it.
Asafar means remedy. The remedy I am most interested in is the kind that begins with being heard and seen, in the language that is yours.
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