The symbolic power of Fusḥā and Darija in Morocco

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the status of Fuṣḥā (i.e. Modern Standard Arabic) and Darija (i.e. colloquial Arabic) in Morocco. The major argument it advances is that these two varieties are only vaguely defined in terms of their linguistic features. Their boundaries are also fuzzy, a fact which leads to different perceptions of them as well as to different construals of utterances as instances of either one or the other variety. In order to test this hypothesis, a set of five sentences were constructed in such a way that they combine standard and colloquial features. These were read by a single voice and recorded on the WhatsApp application and presented to a sample of 155 native speakers belonging to different genders, age groups and with different education levels. The results indicate that there are indeed significant differences between these groups in the way they classify the prompts, but the most interesting difference was found between participants with a higher education level and those with a primary school level or no education at all. These findings indicate that perceptions of the two varieties are partly determined by the social variables investigated. They also suggest that the two varieties are ideological constructs in the sense that different social groups develop their own view of what Fuṣḥā or Darija is either by way of defending their position in the social fabric if they are privileged, or by alienation if they are underprivileged.

KEYWORDS:

• Diglossia
• Fuṣḥā
• Darija
• symbolic power

Acknowledgment

I would like to express my gratitude to Omar Ben Jilali, Aya Chouklati and Youssef Bouaddi for their help in data collection. A word of thanks also goes to Ola Moshref for having read and commented on a previous version of the paper. Two anonymous reviewers also provided valuable comments on that version and contributed substantially to the changes brought to it. However, I am the only one responsible for any remaining shortcomings.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Fishman’s (1968) notion of ‘extended diglossia’ is not relevant to the point being made in this paper. This version of diglossia focuses mainly on language functions and considers as diglossic even relations between different languages that are used by the same community provided that one specialises in ‘high’ functions and the other in ‘low’ functions.

2 The ideological dispute between pro-Fusḥā and pro-Darija activists in Morocco, for example, does not make reference to Middle Moroccan Arabic, though Youssi and his colleagues have been directly involved in it. For those interested in the controversy, including journalists and politicians, pro-Darija activists call for the promotion of the colloquial. How these conceive of Darija is an empirical issue that deserves to be investigated.

3 In many studies on language attitudes in Morocco (cf. Bentahila 1983; Marley 2004 and many others), the values of sophistication, intelligence, modernity and similar values have been found to be associated particularly with French. That should not mean that Fusḥā does not communicate these values as well. It seems that informants evaluate languages comparatively. More precisely, they would evaluate Fusḥā differently when compared to French than when compared to Darija or Berber, for example. French would also be evaluated differently when compared to English (cf. Seddik 2021). When comparing Fusḥā and Darija, the opposition seems to be mainly between literacy and illiteracy and the social connotations that go with them.