Tassadit Yacine is the principal scholarly successor to Mouloud Mammeri in the field of modern Berber studies and the longest-serving editor-in-chief of the journal Awal. She was born in 1949 in Aït Menguellet in Greater Kabylia, was educated at the universities of Algiers and Paris, and has held positions at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris since 1989.
Her academic work concentrates on Kabyle oral poetry, on the social anthropology of Berber gender, and on the politics of language and identity in the post-independence Maghreb. Her edited volumes Poésie berbère et identité (1987) and Aït Menguellet chante (1989, with Mouloud Mammeri) are the principal scholarly treatments of contemporary Kabyle song; her L'izli ou l'amour chanté en kabyle (1988) is the standard study of the women's love-song tradition.
Yacine succeeded Mammeri as editor-in-chief of Awal: cahiers d'études berbères on his death in 1989, and has held the position continuously since. Under her editorship the journal has remained the principal venue of academic Berber studies in French and one of the most important in any language. She has also published widely in non-academic venues on the political situation of Tamazight in Algeria and Morocco and is a frequent commentator on radio and television.
Her ongoing project — a multi-volume edition of the Kabyle poet Si Mohand u M'hand, extending Mammeri's earlier work — is in long-term progress at EHESS and is treated as the next major scholarly contribution to the Kabyle literary tradition.