Volume 2022, Issue 278 - Special Issue: Diglossia and beyond: Revisiting Arabic vernaculars in the contemporary Maghreb; Issue Editors: Atiqa Hachimi, Jacopo Falchetta and Montserrat Benítez Fernández

Cette étude se situe dans le prolongement des travaux se rattachant à l’examen des idéologies langagières en général et de ceux se rapportant à ces idéologies dans les espaces arabophones en particulier. Ma thèse principale consiste à montrer que si le tunisien a existé dans la littérature, la littérature tunisienne, elle, ne s’est exprimée en tunisien que récemment. Sur la base d’un riche travail de documentation portant sur les écritures en tunisien, associé à un travail de terrain anthropologique attentif aux acteurs impliqués dans ces écrits, la question de recherche consistera à interroger deux moments d’écriture en tunisien pour savoir si les écritures correspondant à ces deux moments sont portées par les mêmes idéologies langagières. En filigrane, c’est une lecture critique du concept de diglossie qui me permettra, tout au long de l’article, de soutenir mon argumentation. A la double condition de le considérer comme un concept sociologique plutôt que linguistique d’une part, et de le traverser et non pas de s’y installer pour analyser les pratiques langagières contemporaines d’autre part, il devient possible d’éclairer sous un angle différent les enjeux liés à ces pratiques.

The linguistic situation in the Arab world is in an important state of transition, with the “spoken” vernaculars increasingly functioning as written languages as well. While this fact is widely acknowledged and the subject of a growing body of qualitative literature, there is little quantitative research detailing the process in action. The current project examines this development as it is occurring in Tunisia: I present the findings from a corpus study comparing the frequency of Tunisian Arabic–Standard Arabic equivalent pairs in online forum posts from 2010 with those from 2021. The findings show that the proportion of Tunisian lexical items, compared to their Standard Arabic equivalents, increased from a minority (19.7%) to a majority (69.9%) over this period. At the same time, metalinguistic comments on the forum reveal that, although its status is still contentious, Tunisian has become unmarked as a written language. These changes can be attributed to major developments in Tunisian society over the period of study – including internet access and the 2011 revolution. These findings suggest destabilization of the diglossic language situation in Tunisia and a privileging of national identity vis-à-vis the rest of the Arab world.

Malgré la résistance, voire les protestations, de la population négro-africaine ou sub-saharienne (Halpulaaren, Soninké et Wolofs), la place de l’arabe ne cesse de gagner du terrain en Mauritanie. Face au français qui a perdu son statut de langue officielle en 1991, c’est l’arabe standard qui semble le grand gagnant. Cependant le dialecte arabe ḥassāniyya se maintient comme langue maternelle de l’ensemble de la communauté maure (les Bīđ̣ân ) et son usage tend même à s’étendre dans la rue comme langue de communication. Depuis les années 1970, des formes mixtes sont apparues, notamment dans les productions à visée politique, mais dans l’ensemble, les sphères d’emploi des formes non mixtes sont restées bien différenciées, aussi bien à l’oral qu’à l’écrit. L’usage des nouvelles technologies n’a pas apporté de bouleversement radical: le choix du dialecte ou de l’arabe littéraire continue à dépendre à la fois du locuteur, du thème et du point de vue énonciatif. Cependant, alors que ce choix ne concernait, auparavant, que les productions orales, il s’est étendu dorénavant à l’écrit, certains Mauritaniens n’hésitant plus à communiquer en ḥassāniyya par écrit. C’est notamment cette évolution que je me propose de montrer à travers l’étude de messages reçus par WhatsApp. Le corpus constitué au cours de l’année 2019–2020 comprend des enregistrements audio, des vidéos et des textes écrits. Ceux-ci nous ont été réexpédiés par des Mauritaniens bien informés qui les avaient sélectionnés pour leur intérêt particulier (politique, social ou esthétique). Parmi eux, une dizaine de messages concerne la crise du Covid-19 qui a donné lieu à des prises de position relativement tranchées.

Against the background of the marginalization of North African in relation to Middle Eastern Arabic vernaculars, this paper considers the ways in which popular music has propelled the commodification of Moroccan Arabic and made it a site of deep contestation. It centers on a controversial love song written and performed in Moroccan Arabic by Middle Eastern musicians, specifically their use of sātˁa , a derogatory youth slang term for “girl.” Drawing on in-depth stance-taking analysis of Moroccans’ digital metapragmatic discourse, it argues that metapragmatic debates position some Moroccan musical genres as authentic and some speakers and places as illegitimate representatives of the nation, thus enregistering certain ways of speaking with deviant social types and musical genres. This study has broader implications for the resignification of historically marginalized linguistic varieties in a more globally connected world, including the tensions this creates between the commodification of language and local constructions of sociocultural authenticity and legitimacy.

The sociolinguistic situation in Morocco is complex, with a diversity of Arabic varieties that interact daily. Existing linguistic ideologies have created a hierarchical relationship between these varieties that has been forged for political and socio-economic reasons. Thus, the variety of Casablanca, the economic capital of the country, leads the linguistic levelling in the country and therefore has more social value, but others have less social value, even reaching stigmatization. This is the case of the northwest Moroccan variety that is stigmatized for most Moroccans, but shapes the collective identity in this region. One of the most important cities in the region is Tetouan, a medium-sized city, where the arrival of influences from other Moroccan varieties has created a new-urban variety and has contributed to shaping a new Tetouan identity. This article focuses on folk metalinguistic discourse on the Tetouan Arabic variety. The purpose is to evaluate the metalinguistic beliefs used by speakers to build a collective identity at local and regional level. To do this, the role of social media as a space for ideological language discussions is shown, and chats posted on a Facebook group are examined as an interactive source of data. Specifically, the focus will be placed on an open chat called “Tetouan”, founded in 2012, and in which people from this city write mainly. The results reveal that the social meanings of the different varieties produce antagonistic ideas about them, depending on the context and the participants in the linguistic interaction.

This paper explores metalinguistic representations of Moroccan Arabic, through speakers’ discourses – taken from various spontaneous recordings and interviews with Moroccan Arabic speakers, of various ages, social backgrounds, and, for the most part, living in Meknes – and humoristic images and memes mocking local accents to be found on social media. By comparing language practices and metalinguistic representations with internet memes related to language stereotypes, our objective is to highlight indexicality, iconization and rhematization, in the circulation of metalinguistic representations, especially their reproduction through copy and imitation, which is the main attribute of memes that interests us. Markers, values, meanings associated with variation constantly change and shift through speakers’ practices and discourses, interacting with language ideologies, representations and stereotypes. With that in mind, we examine metalinguistic discourses and sociolinguistic variables in parallel to each other in order to study old and new representations along with social categories such as young/old, virile/effeminate, as well as regional stereotypes.

The symbolic values that speakers attribute to certain linguistic features constitute an important sociolinguistic topic which, barring a few seminal works, has not drawn much attention from scholars working on Maghrebi Arabic, and more specifically, Moroccan varieties. The present paper aims to deepen our understanding of metalinguistic representations of Jebli, a sedentary rural variety of Moroccan Arabic, within the speech communities of Larache and Ouezzane, two urban centres lying on the southern periphery of the Jbala region of Northern Morocco. We first analysed several samples of performed speech taken from an online Moroccan comedy sketch series entitled Jebli & Beldi , which includes a character epitomizing the Jebli accent, in order to identify those salient linguistic features that are perceived as being typically Jebli. As these phonetic and morphosyntactic traits are consciously selected in performed speech, it may be assumed that they make up a linguistic stereotype. We then asked a group of informants in the cities of Larache and Ouezzane to describe what they regarded as the typical features of Jebli speech and also their attitudes towards these features. The results of our study show that the features informants named partly coincided with our own sketch-based selection, and their attitudes towards these features were generally negative. These features did not appear in the speech of most informants, suggesting either their absence in their dialect or a deliberate avoidance strategy on their part. A small number in fact used these features but denied doing so, suggesting that the features are socially stigmatized. We argue that the symbolic values ascribed to some typical Jebli features may trigger their avoidance, which in turn may generate linguistic variation and even lead to linguistic change.

This paper aims at clarifying the role that TV fiction plays in the indexical redistribution of Moroccan Arabic (MA) linguistic features, and how this is connected to media’s contribution to the non-institutional standardisation of MA. First of all, it shows how six variables are employed in the composition of dialogues for two original Moroccan series and two Turkish series dubbed in MA. In the Moroccan series, the assignment of different features to different characters results in the enregisterment of a linguistic opposition between two social types, distinguished by their attachment to place of origin and attitude vis-à-vis modernity. In the dubbed series, standardisation is at issue in that the authors of the linguistic choices – be they the translators or the dubbers – usually select one single form to the exclusion of all other variants. If this selection of a MA norm is judged on the background of the enregisterment patterns identified in the dialogues of the Moroccan series, it then appears as though such norm favours a type of individual free from particularistic regional affiliations, and with a propensity for an anti-traditionalist and (western-like) modern lifestyle and way of thinking.

This paper examines the pivotal role of ideologies in a case of language shift from Targia to Libyan Arabic among Libyan Tuaregs in the south–western region of Libya. I argue that foundational ideologies , the opposed and hierarchical linguistic relationship between Arabic and Targia, a southern Amazigh variety, and ideological elision , the process of shifting the meanings associated with Classical and Modern Standard Arabic (CA, MSA) to Libyan Arabic (LA) (e.g., religious piety), eventually have driven the changes in the linguistic behavior of the Tuareg people towards the attachment to Libyan Arabic and at the expense of Targia. The data is drawn from a fieldwork conducted on two Libyan Tuareg communities, Ghat and Barkat. The former is a multi-ethnic town while the latter is a village composed of only Tuaregs. The sample is comprised of 221 participants (114 from Brakat and 107 from Ghat), balanced by gender and divided into three age groups. A combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches was employed for data collection and analysis. The statistical analysis showed that age group has the most significant effect on the reported use of Targia, followed by type of community and the interactive effect of both variables.

Our paper investigates the relationship between language attitudes and practices in Tunisia, particularly in the two mainly rural governorates of Siliana and Jendouba situated in Northwestern Tunisia. The data that underlie our analysis were gathered in 43 qualitative interviews and through participant observation during fieldwork in spring and summer 2019, and by methodical inquiry into salient linguistic features. First, speakers’ attitudes towards and their evaluation of (1) their own local dialect and (2) the dialect of the capital Tunis reveal that the capital Tunis and coastal towns such as Sousse are perceived as urban and advanced – in education as well as in lifestyle – whereas the central and north-western regions of Tunisia are perceived as rural and culturally backward. We show how speakers apply social meanings to certain linguistic variables such as the use of the urban [q] that is considered as fīnu ‘genteel, refined’ in contrast to the rural [g]. Others, though also clearly urban features, are not equally charged with stereotypes, among them the adoption of the urban personal pronoun of the 1st person sg. ǟna . Second, the impact these evaluations have on speech patterns and consequently on intra-dialectal levelling processes and language change is analysed and its patterns described. We show that language ideologies and attitudes are determined by the intersection of age, gender and level of education, and that young, educated women with a rural background are among the first to adopt urban features. As women in Siliana and Jendouba are expected to act more fīnu than their male peers, they are more inclined to adopt the [q]. The situation of the personal pronoun of the 1st person sg., the plural of III-weak verbs and the loss of gender distinction in verbs, however, is less clear.