Traditions of Women’s Singing and Vocal Traditions in Algeria: Memory, Transmission, Reconfigurations and Future Trajectories

The Turath journal is preparing a special issue devoted to women’s singing and vocal traditions in Algeria. These traditions are approached both as important expressions of intangible cultural heritage and as valuable fields of research into collective memory, oral transmission, and social and cultural change.
Poetry and song have long occupied a central place in the cultural life of the Arab and Amazigh worlds. Yet the relationship between poetic texts and the voices through which they are performed deserves to be explored in greater depth. Rather than bringing together separate disciplinary perspectives, this call encourages dialogue between literature, ethnomusicology, linguistics, sociology, history, and Sound Studies. It invites us to consider the poetic text and its vocal expression as two closely connected dimensions of the same social, cultural, and aesthetic experience.
Within the long history of the Libyco-Berber world, from Numidia to the lands associated with the Gaetuli, women’s singing voices have played an important role in preserving and transmitting knowledge, memories, imaginaries, and symbolic representations. Female vocal traditions are therefore much more than collections of songs. They offer particular ways of experiencing and expressing the world: ways of inhabiting a place, speaking about everyday life, expressing emotions and relationships, and transmitting memories from one generation to another.
This perspective resonates with Adriana Cavarero’s reflection on the human voice, which emphasises the singularity of the speaking and singing subject and the close relationship between voice, body, and meaning (Cavarero, 2005). Similarly, from an ethnomusicological perspective, Steven Feld has shown that singing and soundscapes are not simply forms of aesthetic expression; they are also ways of knowing, remembering, and relating to the surrounding world (Feld, 1982).
Across Algeria, women’s voices reveal an extraordinary cultural diversity. From the hawfī traditions of Tlemcen to the polyphonic and monodic repertoires of the Aurès; from Amazigh vocal traditions in the Djurdjura to the poetic traditions of the Mzab; from the sacred and secular songs of Gourara and Touat to the tindi traditions of Tuareg communities in the Hoggar and Tassili, each region has developed its own forms of vocal expression.
These traditions are closely connected to particular languages, places, social practices, and ways of life. They bring together oral poetry, musical structures, ritual practices, and forms of sociability, while preserving memories of communities and territories. Studying them therefore means listening not only to songs, but also to the social worlds and cultural experiences that give those songs meaning.
The collection and preservation of this oral heritage have a long history. Among the important early contributions is Mohamed Elhabib Hachlaf’s El Haoufi, Chants de femmes d’Algérie, published by Éditions Alpha in 2006. The book brings together orally transmitted texts associated with the hawfī, traditionally regarded as a women’s poetic and vocal genre in the Maghreb (Hachlaf, 2006). Organised around everyday and ritual themes—including the home, the terrace, the ziyāra, the street, the sea, gardens, and the women’s hairdresser—the collection documents an important part of women’s poetic memory. Hachlaf also explores the sociohistorical origins of the hawfī and its relationship with the buqāla, seeking to reconnect these forms of expression with the everyday lives and collective imagination of Algerian women.
More recent scholarship has gone beyond documentation to ask how these traditions work as forms of language, poetry, and artistic expression. In his study of women’s oral poetry in the Maghreb, Mourad Yelles examines 'arūbī, including hawfī and buqāla, as a rich poetic tradition that has often received less scholarly attention than it deserves, despite its continuing presence in collective memory (Yelles, 2002). He highlights its connections with the Hispano-Andalusian poetic tradition, particularly the muwashshaḥ, zajal, and kharja, while also drawing attention to the complex linguistic environment in which these forms have developed.
Women’s vocal traditions move across different varieties of Arabic and Amazigh languages and dialects, as well as different registers of poetic expression. They may draw on Classical Arabic (fuṣḥā), forms of Middle Arabic, zajal, muwashshaḥāt, malḥūn, and mālūf, while also making extensive use of vernacular and popular speech. This linguistic diversity gives rise to distinctive forms of poetic expression in which language, voice, musicality, and gender intersect.
Women’s voices have also provided spaces for expressing experiences and emotions that could not always be articulated openly within established social norms. Even where women’s speech was subject to legal, social, or symbolic restrictions, singers and poets found ways to appropriate existing poetic conventions and give them new meanings. The contrast between domestic spaces and the garden, for example, can become a powerful poetic opposition between social constraint and freedom, between enclosure and movement, and between everyday life and the possibility of love and encounter.
In this sense, anonymous women’s poems are not simply inherited texts. They are also acts of expression through which women have been able to articulate their own experiences, desires, emotions, and perspectives, creating spaces of subjectivity within societies shaped by patriarchal structures (Yelles, 2002).
The meaning of these traditions also emerges through performance. The singer (muṭrib / muṭriba) does not merely reproduce a pre-existing text. Through melodic variation, phrasing, breath, vocal ornamentation, and improvisation (irtiğāl), the performer gives the poem a new life. The act of singing can lead to salṭana, a state of deep musical and emotional immersion, and ultimately to the experience of ṭarab, in which the emotional connection between performer, text, music, and audience becomes particularly intense.
Musical reinterpretation and repeated performance are equally important to the survival of these traditions. Each new performance may preserve elements inherited from the past while introducing subtle changes in melody, rhythm, vocal style, or interpretation. In this way, transmission is not simply a matter of reproducing the past; it is also a process of renewal through which turāth remains alive and meaningful.
The study of Amazigh sung poetry has also undergone important changes since the 1960s. Earlier colonial approaches often treated oral poetry primarily as linguistic material or as a fixed record of supposedly traditional societies. More recent scholarship has increasingly recognised these repertoires as complex literary and aesthetic systems in their own right.
From interdisciplinary and ethnohistorical perspectives, women’s oral poetry can also contribute to the writing of popular history and to understanding the ways communities express belonging and identity. Its study opens up questions about the relationships between poetic metre, musical form, performance, language, memory, and intertextuality.
At the same time, these traditions are changing. Practices that were once closely associated with domestic spaces, rites of passage—such as births, weddings, and mourning—and forms of community solidarity are now being performed in very different contexts. Traditional gatherings increasingly coexist with festivals, cultural events, recordings, social media, and transnational stages.
This transformation raises important questions. What happens to a vocal tradition when it moves from a domestic or ritual setting to a public stage? How does its meaning change when it is recorded, circulated online, or performed for audiences far removed from the community in which it originated? And how do singers themselves negotiate the tension between preserving inherited forms and responding to contemporary artistic expectations?
These questions are particularly relevant in the context of what may be described as a movement from “primary orality,” rooted in physical presence, memory, and ritual interaction, towards forms of “tertiary orality” shaped by digital technologies, social media, and increasingly by artificial intelligence. These technologies create new possibilities for recording, circulation, preservation, and access, while also raising questions about ownership, context, authenticity, and the relationship between communities and their cultural heritage.
This special issue therefore seeks to bring together perspectives from anthropology, ethnomusicology, musicology, oral literature, linguistics, philology, sociology, gender studies, Sound Studies, and the digital humanities. We particularly welcome contributions based on fieldwork, archival research, textual or acoustic analysis, comparative approaches, and critical reflections on safeguarding, digitisation, heritage-making, and the transmission of living cultural practices.

Suggested Thematic Areas
Contributions may address, but are not limited to, the following themes:
1. Heritage, Voice Archaeology and Transmission
Continuities and ruptures in women’s vocal traditions; genealogies of transmission; collection and documentation of oral heritage; the role of memory; the relationship between oral traditions and the writing of popular history; and the reassessment of colonial approaches to oral culture.
2. Epistemology, Poetics and the Expressive Power of the Voice
Female vocality as language and poetic expression; the “language of songs”; constrained or socially regulated forms of poetry; women’s subjectivity; linguistic diversity and diglossia; and philosophical approaches to voice, body, and existence.
3. Musical Performance and the Experience of Ṭarab
Melodic adaptation, vocal aesthetics, improvisation (irtiğāl), salṭana, the relationship between performer and audience, and the ways in which reinterpretation can simultaneously honour inherited traditions and contribute to the vitality of turāth.

 

4. Social Change, Globalisation and Gender
Changes in performance spaces: from domestic settings to festivals and public stages; transformations in women’s participation in musical life; gender relations; the music industry and cultural markets; migration; and transnational networks of circulation.
5. Heritage-Making, Digital Orality, and Emerging Technologies
Digitisation and the preservation of oral traditions; digital archives; social media and new forms of circulation; artificial intelligence and cultural heritage; digital humanities; and the opportunities and challenges involved in documenting, preserving, and making women’s vocal traditions accessible to future generations.

Cavarero, Adriana (2005). For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Translated by Paul A. Kottman. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Feld, Steven (1982). Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hachlaf, Mohamed Elhabib (2006). El Haoufi, Chants de femmes d’Algérie. Poésie. Alger : Éditions Alpha.
Yelles, Mourad (2002). Le Hawfi. Poésie féminine et tradition orale au Maghreb. Alger : Office des Publications Universitaires (OPU).

The Turath journal welcomes original contributions from researchers, academics, doctoral students, and specialists in the humanities and social sciences. We particularly encourage submissions that bring new perspectives to the study of women’s vocal traditions in Algeria and that connect historical forms of expression with the social and cultural realities of the present.
Particular attention will be given to contributions that address current questions surrounding the safeguarding, documentation, digitisation, transmission, and circulation of these living traditions. Contributions that consider how cultural heritage can remain connected to the communities that carry, practise, and transmit it are especially welcome.
Authors are invited to submit their contributions through the ASJP platform by
31 October 2026, using the following link and respecting the template provided:

https://asjp.cerist.dz/en/PresentationRevue/920

For any further information, please contact us at the following email addresses:

turath@crasc.dz / service.revues@crasc.dz