Written Dārija: “māšī məʿìqūl tǝktəb-ha bi-ḥurūf al-luġa al-ʿarabiyya!” It Is not Logical to Write It with the Arabic Letters!

Abstract

This study investigates written linguistic practices emerging from public debate in Morocco. Although Darija is increasingly used in writing, especially in online platforms, most of its users still stigmatize it. In 2017 the Zakoura Foundation edited the first monolingual dictionary of Darija, a fervently debated initiative. So, this analysis aims to show the limits of such codification initiative, and factors which affect language ideology in Morocco. Therefore, a corpus of articles and readers’ comments on the Zakoura Dictionary of two Moroccan digital newspapers, Goud and Hespress, has been analyzed, quantitively and qualitatively, in order to compare the opinions about language and the language varieties in which they were expressed.

Keywords

• Conventionalization. Language Ideologies. Moroccan Digital Newspapers. Orthographic Norms. Standardization. Written Darija