Language and linguistic knowledge
Morocco’s geographical location as a bridge between Europe and Africa, and as a home for Arab, Amazing, Andalusia, African and Jewish cultures, make of the country a place of considerable linguistic diversity. In this article, this diversity will be approached from a personal perspective, unsparingly as a result of reading Chapter 7 “Language in Society’ in “Introduction to Language”. Geographically speaking, spoken all over Morocco, there are tens of dialects descendents of Arabic and Amazing languages. The Arabic dialects range from the
Hosannas’ dialect spoken In the Southern Sahara Regions, through the different colloquial Arabic dialects of regions like Marshes and Fez, to the Arabic spoken in the Northern Regions close to Spain. Similarly, Amazing language gives rise to many dialects and sub dialects, specifically Tasteless In the Souses Region, Taming in the High Atlas and Tariff In the North. These regional dialects do not have definite boundaries (etiologies) among them, but certainly overlap to form a dialect continuum. Moroccan speakers of all this disparity of dialects seem to reach a minimum of mutual intelligibility.
In cases where they fail to, they resort to the modern Moroccan Colloquial Arabic (Dare) as their lingua franca. Importantly these regional dialects exhibit linguistic differences on different levels. At the phonological level there Is a vowel deletion In the Hosannas’ dialect for verbs following pronoun ‘You”. Kilt (you have eaten) or jilt (you have come) are uttered as kilt and Jilt in other dialects of Arabic. At the Phonetic level, the Arabic speakers of the North uses q; while that of the middle regions use g as in CUL (say) and gull especially.
At the lexical level, Tasteless and other Amazing dialects show many disparities. Head in Tasteless is said Agway, sashays in Taming and carry in Tariff. Besides the aforementioned dialects, most Moroccan use French and therefore are bilinguals. Amazing language, although a national language declared recently, has not gained satisfactory public and political support. Code-switching Is as a result usual from Arabic or Amazing to French. Arabic speakers and Amazing may respectively say wring la presence dialogue f terrain; militarily la presence nun GHz rain (show me your presence on the ground).
Extensively, Moroccan use borrowing from French or English when they speak. An Arabic speaker may say hall these Believable dalai . Behavior Is here borrowed from English and It becomes subject to the Arabic definite article I instead of the. 1 OFF Linguistic variation in Morocco is not defined by geography only. Although it is hard to describe social dialects in Morocco in term of social classes as society does not show clear stratification, there is presence of different speech varieties pertaining to arioso social groups.
These are defined on the basis of gender, age or religion. Young generation, especially in urban areas appear to develop different speech variations as a result of the influence of the widespread media and new telecommunication means. Words like shrill (threaten) or aqua (money) are to make most people frown on. Religious groups, particularly the total (Koran scholars) have developed Jargon’s which they are the only ones to understand. As regard gender, Moroccan women seem to use a slightly different language to men.
This is due to the revealing social attitudes and cultural expectations reinforcing more conversational decency among females than males. A woman would not generally be expected to make requests without using Allah kill (please) or ‘ram walked (God bless you). Honestly, a warning is that the previous analysis of the linguistic variation in Morocco should not be considered as any reference since it is a personal reflection based on very limited individual knowledge. Nevertheless, it is an invitation for a thoroughly scientific and linguistic research which can be of a reference value for linguists in Morocco and beyond.
