Moroccan women and the rise of written darija
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2008
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
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Abstract
What happens when the unwritten, informal dialect of the home and the street appears in print? In multilingual Morocco, Arabic, the country's official language, represents a diglossia; the varieties of Arabic, darija and fusha, have distinct domains of usage and acceptability. Currently, the primarily oral, informal variety of darija is increasingly found in print media, on billboards, street signs, and other written contexts normally reserved for fusha, the fore formal variety of Arabic. As darija appears in more formal contexts, it changes subtly, complicating the boundaries of the Moroccan Arabic diglossia. In this paper, I discuss the rise in written darija for the Moroccan linguistic landscape, in particular for women, who are more traditionally associated with the oral and informal varieties. My findings are based on original ethnographic fieldwork conducted from June to August 2007 when I lived in the Moroccan city of Fez and conducted interviews with 14 Moroccan women. In the first section of this paper, I present a theoretical and historical framework. Drawing on sociolinguistic theories of literacy, orality, and dislossia, I examine the idea of the Moroccan quadriglossia and the current linguistic situation for Moroccan women. After discussing my research methodology in the second section, I present an analysis of the data I collected in Morocco in the third section, both providing evidence for the rise in written darija and examining the way this rise is viewed by the 14 women I interviewed. Finally, in the conclusion, I reflect on this research and provide suggestions for future studies of written darija in Morocco.