Language and gender in Moroccan urban areas
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Fatima Sadiqi
Abstract
A central issue in the interaction between language and gender in Morocco is urbanity. The written languages, namely Modern Standard Arabic and French, are the languages of institutions which have always been closely linked to urban areas, the typical loci of knowledge and power. Non-written languages, namely Berber and Moroccan colloquial Arabic, are represented as rural and indigenous because they are unlearned and are associated with rural areas, particularly Berber. Unlike the latter, Modern Standard Arabic and French are powerful because they are elitist, given their relation to education, government, and religion (Modern Standard Arabic). Berber and Moroccan Arabic are considered low or powerless because they lack the above-mentioned qualities and they are unimportant for social promotion. Language representations in Morocco are also important because they interact in significant ways with gender. Whereas Modern Standard Arabic and French are associated with public space, Berber and Moroccan Arabic are linked to private space, which happens to be the typical space of women; given the correlation between women, native tongues, and private space. However, with women's access to free education and to work in postcolonial Morocco, the notion of space changed, resulting in the recent mass feminization of the public sphere and women's access to “urban” languages, i.e., French and Modern Standard Arabic. As women have become more active in public life and the public sphere in general, they are considerably contributing to linguistic change and diversity and intensely instigating significant social changes.
© Walter de Gruyter
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Introduction
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- Multilingualism, Cultural Identity, and Education in Morocco, by Moha Ennaji
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Introduction
- Gender, sex, and language in Valencia: attitudes toward sex-related language among Spanish and Catalan speakers
- Situating senior women in the literacy landscape of North Africa
- Continuité, rupture et construction identitaires : analyse de discours d'immigrés maghrébins en France
- Between the languages of silence and the woman's word: gender and language in the work of Assia Djebar
- Morocco's languages and gender: evidence from the field
- Emergence et développement de la différenciation de genre entre 7 et 18 ans : perception de stimuli en arabe marocain en milieu scolaire à Ksar el Kébir
- Language and gender in Moroccan urban areas
- Representations of women in Moroccan Arabic and Berber proverbs
- Constructing gender identity in two languages
- Multilingualism, Cultural Identity, and Education in Morocco, by Moha Ennaji
- Retrospective insight: reflections on the specialist's role in developing an Arapaho language assessment protocol
