Arabic in the Middle Atlas Mountains (Morocco)

The project will be a case study of the development of a "national" language that emerges and stabilizes in the back of the institutions of language policy (esp. educational institutions): Moroccan Arabic. To achieve this aim the linguistic practices of that part of the population will be investigated whose family language is not Arabic: in the Berber hinterland, from where speakers of Moroccan Arabic are increasingly recruited. The basis of the project is an existing comprehensive corpus of spoken Moroccan Arabic, especially informal conversations, from the Middle Atlas region as well urban areas, to which data from additional field research shall be added to control for the actual situation. Based on current research in contact linguistics, the working hypothesis of the project is that the emergence of a supra-regional language form (koiné) is impressed by structural constraints that optimize the potentials for development at the cost of idiosyncratic structures of traditional dialects. This hypothesis shall be verified by comparing the linguistic practices of "new Speakers" and "old speakers" of Moroccan Arabic. This implies a detailed control of the data by the tendencies of development of Arabic that can be extrapolated diachronically (with regard to the supra-regional Arabic speaking world) on the one hand, the dialects in the old Arabic speaking area of Morocco on the other hand, and dialectally diversified development in Berber as well. This explains the design of the project as a common enterprise of General Linguistics and Arabic Studies. The analysis of spontaneous spoken data is a recent field in General Linguistics. Research done there has shown that the categories of traditional linguistic analysis, that are oriented to monitored texts (especially written texts, syntactically edited in regard to the basis category sentence of school grammar) cannot be presupposed here. Thus the project, that will analyse a large corpus of tape recordings of spontaneous spoken language, has to innovate. The necessary analyses must be controlled for the detailed knowledge of Arabic Study, especially Arabic dialectology. Despite representing a novum, the integration of both disciplines in a common project is a precondition for a successful realization of such an enterprise.

The purpose of this project was to describe and analyze the linguistic dynamics of Morocco, which is regarded as an emerging market country. Moroccos linguistic dynamics is still largely obscured by the Moroccan governments official language policy emphasizing Standard Arabic, which is, however, only mastered by that minority of citizens who have received systematic long-term education. The language common to the whole country, however, is Moroccan Arabic, which is only orally used and has never gained the status of a written communication. Moroccan Arabic is also used for outside communication by the relatively large group who speak one of the three Berber varieties as their first language. Published studies on Moroccan Arabic have hitherto mainly dealt with local dialects (Arabic and Berber), mostly ignoring the linguistic dynamics beyond the written language and the traditional local dialects. During this project a large corpus of unmonitored spontaneous speech was recorded. Most of the speakers still use Berber as a default language in conversation within the family. Linguistic analysis of this corpus reveals the mechanisms by which a countrywide spoken colloquial language has emerged. As the corpus contains recordings in many different registers of speech, it has been possible to determine the phonological, syntactical, and lexical features of the new koiné and to compare it with the forms used in the various local and regional dialects. The recordings also reveal that the common language as used in urban centers is more diffuse and open to variation than the variety spoken in the Middle Atlas Mountains, which was the main region under study. Besides linguistic analysis, the project has aimed to make the corpus accessible to further research. Many of the recordings will be available on-line, and a selection of texts including translations was published in a separate volume. Beyond academic research, the results of this project could be productively used pedagogically, in particular with regard to numerous Moroccans who have migrated to Western Europe. Even in Morocco itself there is a growing desire among educational experts to find better ways of bridging the gap between the written and spoken languages by exploiting the linguistic competences the pupils already have on the level of the dialect.