The urban and the urbane: Identities, language ideologies, and Arabic dialects in Morocco

Abstract

The migration of old-urban elites to new-urban areas has been given scant attention in the sociolinguistics of mobility. This article examines language ideologies of differentiation that emerged from the migration of Morocco's bona fide old-urban elite from the city of Fez (the Fessis) to the new metropolis of Casablanca. This understudied sociolinguistic encounter brings into sharp focus two quintessential old-urban and new-urban varieties of Arabic along with their complex indexical system that links linguistic forms to identities, lifestyles, and moralities. Based on ethnography and discourse analysis of interviews with two women of Fessi extraction in Casablanca (a migrant and a local-born), I provide an in-depth account of what sounding Fessi means and accomplishes—and fails to accomplish—for these women, showing in the process the (re)production and change of language ideologies. The article demonstrates how changes in indexicalities relate to ongoing group boundary reconfiguration and to processes of linguistic (non)accommodation. (Arabic, North Africa, language ideologies, indexicality, gender, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics of mobility, historical prestige, social reallocation)*

Social integration and dialect divergence in coastal Palestine

“…These speakers stood out among females and males of various South African ethnic groups, and their linguistic innovation has as its target a sort of supralocal standard – similar to the supralocal glottal stop variant of (Q) which we report about here. The tendencies of female speakers could also be seen to reify the indexicality of this variant with notions of ‘femininity’ or ‘urbanness,’ a point raised by speakers themselves during fieldwork in the Gaza Strip, and the oft‐reported stigmatic interpretation of the glottal variant when used by male speakers or in non‐urban communities (Al‐Wer ; Eckert ; Hachimi ; Silverstein ).…”

“…We now turn to the variable (Q), which is perhaps the most widely examined linguistic feature in sociolinguistic studies of Arabic (e.g. Abd El‐Jawad , ; Al‐Wer ; Al‐Wer and Herin ; Hachimi , ; Haeri ; Holes ). Versteegh describes the diachrony of this phoneme as having once been /ɡ/, the voiced counterpart of the voiceless /k/.…”

Language Ideology Change Over Time: Lessons for Language Policy in the U.S. State of Arizona and Beyond

“…Although the above discussion suggests that a substantial shift (e.g., toward more positive orientation to the pro‐multilingualism language ideology) may drive or support a language policy reform effort, we know relatively little about how much, how quickly, and by which mechanisms language ideologies change within a polity. Some evidence suggests that demographic shifts can facilitate increased articulation or ideological change mediated by identity formation as group boundaries are defended and reworked (Hachimi, ). Similarly, McIntosh () concluded from ethnographic analysis that changes in White Kenyans’ language ideologies about Kiswahili and language practices using Kiswahili in Kenya have shifted over decades as political power has shifted away from Whites since the end of colonialism.…”

Do you speak Arabic? Managing axes of adequation and difference in pan-Arab talent programs

“…At the same time, other forms of Arabic have persisted and derived their own forms of prestige (Haeri, 1997(Haeri, , 2003. Arabs have historically marked sociolinguistic distinctions through a variety of classification paradigms, or axes of differentiation that include nation, state, regional, and social registers: 1) Arab nation (al-ʕumma al-ʕarabiyya) versus some Other (Turks, Europeans, Berbers, Armenians, Persians), and which does not equate to the Muslim nation (al-ʕumma al-ʕisl amiyya) since it includes Christian, Jewish, and non-Sunni Muslim Arabic speakers as well (Suleiman, 2003:6-15); 2) supraregional forms: Maghreb as Arab West (primarily Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco), Mashreq as Arab East (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine) at times including or excluding Egypt, and Khalij as the Arab Gulf, which also either includes or distinguishes Iraq (Hachimi, 2013:270, Holes, 2004:47, Theodoropoulou and Tyler, 2014; 3) urban-rural divides: badaw ı Arabic glossed by some as rural or tribal and subdivided into nomadic vs. village agriculturalists, and urban had _ ar ı Arabic at times indexed as civilized, sedentary (Bassiouney, 2009:19); 4) postcolonial national varieties: Egyptian, Tunisian, Iraqi, Saudi (Bassiouney, 2010;Suleiman, 2011:51-52); 5) intra-national isoglosses within a state: Fessi (from Fez), Casawi (western Moroccan), Marrakeshi (from Marrakesh), and Shamali (northern) within Morocco (Hachimi, 2012, see Haeri, 1997 for the Egyptian context); 6) socioeconomic and educational registers such as ʕarab ız ı (mixed Arabic and English), ʕarnasiyya (mixed Arabic and French), fus _ h _ a (Modern Standard Arabic), street talk (alfahl aw ıya, shaʕb ıya, hadra dzanqa), and polite speech (Bassiouney, 2012:129, Miller, 2012:180-182, Suleiman, 2004.…”