Do low-status mother tongues include communicative features of academic language? A quantitative and qualitative approach to Darija in Morocco

Abstract

This article aims at investigating Darija, one of the mother tongues in Morocco with low status and mainly used for everyday communication, in terms of the academic language features that qualify the language of schooling, mainly referred to as the Academic Register. An important body of literature reveals that the home register considerably differs from the school register in many respects [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] among others. Therefore, early exposure to the characteristics of the academic language at home is a prerequisite for children to succeed in academic environments [4, 7]. An examination of the precursors of academic language features occurring in early mother‐child interactions was undertaken. The proposed theoretical framework, based on systemic functional linguistics and informed by research on the language of school, was adopted for assessing mother-child interactions in two different tasks and in two different measurement times at home. The DASH coding scheme was used to code and the CLAN was involved in running frequencies of the occurrence of each feature, namely the nonpresent talk (decontextualized language) at the textual level, and open-ended questions and assertives at the socio-pragmatic level. Darija was found to include the features of the academic register though to varying degrees. Therefore, though Darija is the language used in informal contexts, its status was found far from influencing its academicy. The variations revealed in the results were mainly related to the family’s socioeconomic status SES) and home literacy practices. Consequently, Darija was found to be like any other Standard language.