Channeling Moroccanness. Becky L. Schulthies

Casawi (western Moroccan), Marrakeshi (from Marrakesh), and Shamali (northern) within Morocco (Hachimi 2012; see Haeri 1997 for the Egyptian context);

      (6) Socioeconomic and educational registers such as ʿarabīzī (mixed Arabic and English), ʿarnasiyya (mixed Arabic and French), fuṣḥā (Modern Standard Arabic), street talk (alfahlāwīya, shaʿbīya, hadra dzanqa), and polite speech (Bassiouney 2012, 129; C. Miller 2012, 180–82; Suleiman 2004, 29–34);

      (7) A theoretical frame found by linguists to reproduce another axis of differentiation: the standard versus everything else. As they studied Arabic, linguists reproduced, amended, and challenged these difference classifications most often within a diglossic theoretical frame in which the transnational standard, known as MSA or fuṣḥā, was contrasted with all these other “local” distinctions. These axes of difference, while situationally evoked, did important relationality work.

      In addition, when discussing the linguascape of Morocco, multilingualism in some form invariably appeared, as seen in the episodes in the Introduction. The degree of diversity points to the difficulty in calibrating these axes of language difference as channels shaping Moroccanness connection. Multilingualism was decried (A. Laroui 1973; Youssi 1995) and touted as a mark of modern identity (Khatibi 1990), depending on the language ideologies adopted by scholars and citizens alike. As related in Chapter 2, some Fassis viewed the national language of Morocco as French-darīja codeswitching, not Arabic. Many scholars extended and simplified Moroccan multilingualism into Standard Arabic, Amazigh/Berber, Moroccan Arabic, and French (Sadiqi 2003, 46; Benmamoun 2001, 97). Elsewhere Ennaji and Sadiqi claimed there were seven languages and dialects interacting in Morocco: Berber, Moroccan Arabic, Classical Arabic, Standard Arabic, French, English, and Spanish (2008, 4). Ennaji (2005), in a volume on education and language policy in Morocco, described the language situation as one of French/Arabic or Berber/Moroccan Arabic bilingualism with Arabic quadriglossia (Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Educated Spoken Arabic, and Moroccan Arabic). He further divided Moroccan Arabic into urban and rural varieties with regional variations: Tanjawi, Casawi, Fassi, Marrakeshi (Ennaji 2005, 59). Yossi argued for trilingualism and triglossia: Berber, Arabic, and French with Arabic broken down into Moroccan Arabic, Middle or educated Moroccan Arabic, and Literary Arabic (Youssi 1995, 34, 41). Hachimi echoed the previous language/dialect formulations and examined the outcomes of contact between women speaking two competing Moroccan urban dialects: an old historical urban prestige variety of Fes and a new Casablancan koine tied to the rapid internal migration and urbanization of the mid-twentieth century (Hachimi 2005). In particular, she explored the variability of two phonological features (the Fassi alveolar trilled /r/ as a uvular /ɹ/ and the uvular stop /q/ as /ʔ/) and the gendered identity work linked with their usage among Fassi women who had moved to Casablanca.

      These broad categorizations of language varieties did not quite capture the fine-honed sensitivities Fassis had toward linguistic features and regional identity markings I observed in my own fieldwork. They not only recognized, but regularly deployed regional and social features to play with or mock each other through these recognizable social personas indexed through linguistic features. One extended family with whom I studied and worked in Fez hailed from the Arabic-speaking northern Rif Mountains and were known as jbala, mountain folk. The grandfather migrated from the village to Fez in the 1920s and founded a network of communal ovens in the old medina and provided grain from his village during World War II. He married a Fassi woman and had two sons, one of whom grew up speaking old urban bourgeois Fassi and the other a new Fassi koine (Caubet 1993). Both differed in phonological, morphological, and lexical ways from Jebli (mountain jbala) speak. Jebli shared the uvular stop /ʔ/ for /q/ as the old Fassi urban dialect (which the new Fassi koine realized as /q/), but old urban Fassis were known to pronounce the vowels accompanying the /ʔ/ as diphthongs /aj/ or /aw/. In addition, the habitual aspect marker in Jebli third person was /m-/ instead of the urban /k-/ or /t-/ (shared by both Fassi urban varieties). The voiced palatal affricate /ʒ/ was pronounced /z/ in old Fassi and /ʒ/ in Jebli and new Fassi. Jebli and the new Fassi koine both used the alveolar trilled /r/ rather than the old Fassi uvular /ɹ/. There were a number of lexical variants among all three as well (see Hachimi 2005 and Caubet 1993).

      Each language variety had identity characterizations or personas associated with it. Old Fassi historically was tied to urban, well-connected, bourgeois elites, civilized, proud, and polite, though it had recently been considered feminine because of its preservation among older women (Hachimi 2005, 41). The new Fassi koine was described to me as a modern urban leveling variety, adopted by a new generation of rural migrants interested in disassociating themselves from the stigma of their origins and indexical of a modern neo-urbanity untied to the Fassi old guard elites. Jebli was an ‘araba, “country/ rural” dialect, and linked to illiterate, uncultured, proud mountain-folk. As mentioned, after independence, Fassi elites moved out of the medina and into the ville nouvelle or to the coastal political and economic centers promoted by the French (Rabat and Casablanca). Arab Jbala, Berbers from the Rif Mountains, and other migrants from the south and east moved into the homes of the Fassi emigrants and altered the linguistic make-up of the medina.

      The family mentioned previously were part of this changing soundscape. They had equal access to all three language varieties (Jebli, Old Fassi, and Fassi koine), and the question arose as to why one son affiliated with the speech of his mother (Old Fassi) and the other opted for a variety not spoken by either parent (Fassi koine). The two brothers themselves politely teased each other, attributing the differences to the baraka “blessing” of Moulay Idriss, the founder of Fez. Some family members claimed the old Fassi-speaking son sought to claim an educated bourgeois identity in his social climb out of Jebli origins. By speaking the “feminized” old Fassi, he distanced himself from a rural identity and linked his social connections to old Fassi elites. The other son spoke the new Fassi koine, attaching himself to an urban modernity. Both sons married rural women whose language varieties shifted to the new Fassi koine over time, though they would shift back to their rural forms when interacting with relatives from the countryside. All the children of both families, with the exception of one daughter (of the old Fassi-speaking father), had adopted the new Fassi koine, intertwined with French. In interviews with family members, they were all cognizant of the differences, even teasing each other about their linguistic identities and appropriating Jebli and old Fassi to embody the well-known socially evaluated identity distinctions. To speak, listen, and write in Fez was to calibrate values associated with persona stereotypes of Moroccan relationality, many of which were linked in some way to a form of Arabic. But Arabic was a shifter: it meant different things to different people at different times, as you will read in the coming chapters (see also Schulthies 2015).