![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Neoliberalism has had substantial resonance in Moroccan governance in the past few decades. Neoliberalism has occasioned a wide-ranging reconstitution of profit accumulation, politics, society, and the individual ‘citizen’ not least as part of the construction of a new collective common sense. The contention of this paper is that Moroccan language policy/politics is articulated amidst this neoliberal capture. It unfolds in a discursive and institutional environment characterized by uneven, dispersed but dense topographies of neoliberalization, in turn carved up by the political rationalities of state-sanctioned capital accumulation, reproduction and governmentality. While tokenistically congenial to linguistic pluralism, the Moroccan language regime espouses a marked neoliberal reconfiguration of language and multilingualism. The Moroccan language regime appears to have congealed into a neoliberal linguistic consensus predicated on neoliberal multilingualism, a stratified matrix of linguistic differentiation informed by the ideologies and structures of neoliberal political economy and practices of power. Embedded in this regime is linguistic governmentality, the linguistically sanctioned nurturing of neoliberal subjectivity couched within the coordinates of performativity and the neoliberal discursive assortments of human capital, the knowledge economy, employability and lifelong learning. This paper attempts to sketch the lineaments of this evolving linguistic regime with a view to rendering visible the spaces of interplay between neoliberal governance and language politics. The paper concludes with a reflection on the implications for the analysis of potential permutations of neoliberalism under Covid-19.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The neoliberal linguistic consensus does not suggest that the relationship between national languages (Amazigh and Arabic) is non-hierarchical. The local language ecology is highly stratified where the domination of Arabic has been integral to nation-state formation and national cultural politics and where Amazigh has suffered from chronic devitalization (see text below and Author 2012, Citation2016b, Citation2018 for more details on exclusionary Arabization, state Jacobinism and Amazigh devitalization). The emphasis of the argument here is on the neoliberal recomposition and entrenchment of language hierarchies in Morocco.
2 This distinction is ironic because, according to Ehnologue, Arabic is also an international language: https://www.ethnologue.com/enterprise-faq/how-many-international-languages-egids-0-are-there#:~:text=There%20are%206%20international%20languages,%2C%20Russian%2C%20Arabic%20and%20Chinese. Amazigh, in all its variation, is also a transnational language including its status as the language of the Amazigh diaspora. This further attests to the fact that the division is a discursive construction.
3 Analytics of language politics in Morocco which enlist evocative metaphors of ‘language war’ (Lefevre Citation2015), ‘language tragedy’ (Laroui Citation2011) or ‘symbolic violence’ (Boukous Citation2012) to describe the tenuous dynamics of language diversity do not capture these complex cultural, economic and political ramifications of neoliberal language politics.
4 Amazigh, as pointed out above, is completely discounted.
5 The argument does not by any means intimate a rejectionist stance. My interest is primarily to disentangle the structural and ideological determinations of linguistic hierarchies and injustice under neoliberalism. I am irredeemably in favor of enhancing additive multilingual repertoires and symbolic capitals of individuals and communities. It would be an egregious form of symbolic capital dispossession, if not a cognitive, cultural and social crime, to suggest otherwise. But I am also strongly in favor of strengthening local languages and knowledges, building reflexive, subaltern cosmopolitanisms against the neoliberal/colonial grain and constructing non-hegemonic multilingual and poly-centric projects which nurture our freedoms to author and agentively transform our own lives as subjects and communities. Let all the pluriversal flowers bloom at the rendez-vous of pluriversalingualism (Kabel Citation2021).