After an early career in the Faculty of Letters of Algiers and CRAPE (Centre de Recherches Anthropologiques Préhistoriques et Ethnologiques) from 1973 to 1981, he joins University of Provence serving as an associate professor of Berber Language from 1981 to 1983, and CNRS from 1984 to 1989 where he continued his research activities in the laboratory LAPMO (Laboratoire d'anthropologie et de préhistoire de la Méditerranée occidentale) founded and directed by Gabriel Camps.
From 1989 to 2008, he worked as a Berber Language Professor at Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales ("Langues'O") in Paris, where he created in 1990 Centre de Recherche Berbère (Berber Research Center) he directed until the end of 2009.
He is currently Professor of Berber language at the Aix-Marseille University where he is also a research associate at Iremam (Institut de recherches et d'études sur le monde arabe et musulman).
[2][3] His involvement in the Encyclopédie berbère dates back to the launching phase of the project by Gabriel Camps in 1970, when he was still a student at the University of Provence.
The founding team comprising only pre-historians and ethnologists, Gabriel asked him to invest in the linguistic field.