Linguistic Variation, Social Meaning and Covert Prestige in a Northern Moroccan Arabic Variety

Abstract

This paper addresses how gender and age, as macro-sociological factors, influence variation and change in the Northern Moroccan Arabic variety of Ouezzane, and how social meaning plays a role in this variation. To do so, it examines the high degree of variability in the realization of two phonetic variables, the voiceless alveolar plosive /t/ and the voiceless uvular plosive /q/, in a corpus of semi-scripted interviews with 20 local informants. The data for the study was gathered during several fieldwork campaigns carried out between 2014 and 2021. The analysis combines quantitative and qualitative methods. Quantitative comparisons are drawn across gender and three age categories (under 30, between 30 and 50, and over 50) to search for gender and/or age markers, while the data are qualitatively analyzed with regard to the increase in the use of certain allophones, attrition and loss of other variants, and metalinguistic comments made by informants on those traits. These two methods make it possible to identify how the phonetic variables analyzed contribute to the construction of various identities, such as an “older person” identity, as well as self-affiliation with particular social groups, such as “artisans” or “rural women”, from which other groups, such as male university graduates, are keen to distance themselves.

The Status of the French Language in North Africa

“…These languages are used on a daily basis by the vast majority of citizens in each country, regardless of their levels of education or their social status. They are languages that have evolved from the Modern Standard Arabic language, which many linguists call 'variation of Arabic' (Benítez Fernández, 2023); but they also have sources from several other languages, such as Tamazigh, French, Turkish, and Spanish, that have coexisted through history; and from there we can talk about the significance of multilingualism in African countries (Observatoire de la langue française de l'Organisation de la Francophonie 2018). It is noted that this rich coexistence is reflected in the language and reflects the identity of each country .…”

Variación lingüística o la emergencia de nuevas variedades altas de la lengua árabe: Marruecos como estudio de caso

“…El paulatino desuso de este rasgo se ha constatado entre los hablantes de la tribu de Ghzaoua, -tribu jebli localizada entre el suroeste de la provincia de Chef Chauen y el noreste de la provincia de Ouezzane-y una pérdida total del mismo entre los hombres altamente alfabetizados y las mujeres de Ouezzane. Se mantiene, en variación con la uvular sorda [q], entre los artesanos de la ciudad -fundamentalmente poco o nada alfabetizados-y el grupo de mujeres especialmente ligadas a la montaña, bien por haber llegado a la ciudad en fechas recientes, bien por no mostrar -ni en su forma de vestir, ni en sus relaciones, ni en sus actividades-una completa adaptación a la vida urbana (Benítez Fernández, 2023;Benítez Fernández y Guerrero, 2022). El mismo proceso de atrición está sufriendo la velar sonora [g] en el dialecto de Oujda -noreste de Marruecos-.…”