Darija in the Moroccan Press: the Case of the Magazine Nichane

Sociolinguistic ISSN: 1750-8649 (print) Studies ISSN: 1750-8657 (online) Article

Darija in the Moroccan press: The case of the magazine Nichane

Jan Hoogland

Abstract Darija, the Arabic colloquial of Morocco, and basically a spoken language, has gone through major emancipation processes since 2002. An illustration of this process is the magazine Nichane that appeared between September 2006 and September 2010 and that published articles featuring varying amounts of written Darija. This article presents an analysis of Darija as it is used in the magazine, relating the results to the current emancipation processes of this same language.

KEYWORDS: DARIJA, NICHANE, MOROCCO, DIGLOSSIA, MODERN STANDARD ARABIC

Afﬁliation

Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands email: [email protected]

1 Introduction

Since the early 2000s an emancipation of Darija has been taking place in Morocco. Caubet (2017:118) states: ‘The status of Darija has changed radically in the last ten years: it had been associated with illiteracy, backwardness and was considered incompatible with education or progress. Now it has become trendy and modern’. Elinson (2017), Kindt and Kebede (2017) and Miller (2017) describe the latest linguistic developments in Morocco in terms of changes in the use of Darija in writing. Mejdell (2017) remarks about the changing writing habits in the Arab world: ‘Pluralism of expression is held to be a characteristic of late modern society all over the world. The signs of destandardization we see in (parts of) the Arab world, opening up new norms for writing, represent a process which, I believe, will not be reversed’ (Mejdell, 2017:85). This article reports on a study of a venture that has tried to actively contribute to the promotion of the use of Darija in written form in a weekly magazine. This magazine is called Nichane; it first appeared in September 2006, with its final issue released on 1 October 2010. Several researchers have touched upon Nichane in different publications (Miller, 2012, 2017; Elinson, 2013; Hall, 2015; Iddins, 2015), which are discussed below. A more profound study of Nichane and its language use has not been undertaken yet. Both Miller (2012, 2017) and Hall (2015) have advocated such a study to be carried out. The present article is an effort to fill that gap and to nuance some of the conclusions of the other studies mentioned, which were based on examining a limited number of issues and articles from Nichane. Two research questions are tackled: 1. To what extent does Nichane use Darija in its content? 2. How does the magazine Nichane fit in and contribute to the debate on Darija in Morocco?

I carried out the study by creating a corpus of texts taken from Nichane and performing a quantitative analysis of these texts in order to establish the percentage of Darija in the content of Nichane. Results from this analysis are consequently used in order to evaluate the role Nichane performed in the process of emancipation of Darija in Morocco. This article is structured as follows. The following section (section 2) opens with a brief discussion of the position of Darija in Morocco and recent developments concerning this position. In section 3 I describe the creation, existence and end of the magazine Nichane, which ran from 2006 to 2010. Section 4 focuses on other studies on Nichane. Section 5 and its following subsections present the methodology applied in the research and the results of the analysis on a corpus of 110 texts consisting of almost 104,000 words. Section 6 contains the conclusions of the study and some evaluative remarks in the light of both research questions.

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2 Darija in Morocco

In the debate on Darija basically three positions can be distinguished: a) ‘Darija should become a national language, including in writing’. Mourad El Alami, a professor of German language who has translated several works form German into Darija and who also wrote the novel Ar-Rahīl, in Darija (El Alami, 2012), is a very strong advocate of this position. In several interviews he has expressed that he is in favour of the emancipation of Darija in the country (Ezzouak, 2011; Rabbaj, 2012). Elinson (2013:723) describes some of El Alami’s publications. b) ‘Darija should play a role in primary education’. It was Noureddine Ayyouche, a former businessman and founder of the Zakoura foundation, a Moroccan NGO striving for the improvement of the education system in the country, who stirred a national debate on this subject. Ayyouche is a strong advocate of the use of Darija as a language of instruction in the Moroccan educational system, in particular in primary schools. c) ‘Darija should remain the spoken language for informal daily use, and Standard Arabic should maintain its position as the language of formal use’. Historian and intellectual Abdellah Laroui and politicians of most political parties want the situation to remain as it has been for many years (see also the article of Gago Gómez elsewhere in this volume on the conservative stance of the Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco on the role of Darija and the primacy of Standard Arabic).

The publications mentioned above, as well as others (Caubet, 2006; Benítez Fernández, 2010; Miller, 2014) extensively discuss the recent developments in Morocco on the debate on Darija, which has been concisely summarized by Ziamari and de Ruiter (2016). Although the new Constitution of 2011 does not explicitly mention Darija, it does mention linguistic plurality, which is an implicit recognition of the various spoken languages in Morocco (Ziamari and de Ruiter, 2016). There is a hierarchy of languages: written languages are conferred a higher status than spoken languages, which conﬁrms the earlier discussed diglossic relation between Standard Arabic and Darija. However, in Morocco an atmosphere has emerged in which a plea for Darija is by many people considered a plea against Standard Arabic, and consequently against Islam and the Arab nation (Ziamari and de Ruiter, 2016; see also Gago Gómez in this volume). Nevertheless, Darija has gained in prestige during the ﬁrst decade of the new century. This process of emancipation of Darija started when the francophone journal TelQuel published an article with the title ‘Darija langue nationale’ (Darija, national language) in issue number 34 of June 2002 (TelQuel, 2002). The

276 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES article claims that Darija is the language that most Moroccans speak when they talk to each other but that at the same time it does not enjoy the status of national language. Darija allegedly lacks any form of status or prestige. Darija is being undervalued and thus Moroccans not only underestimate the importance of their mother tongue, but of themselves too. In education, Darija could play an important role as a language of instruction, but officially this is not allowed. However, to improve the effectiveness of education, teachers do use Darija in their classrooms. In the media, the use of both Standard Arabic and Darija symbolizes a sort of schizophrenia, characterized by people speaking incomprehensible Standard Arabic when confronted with a microphone. The creation of Nichane marked an important phase in the emancipation of Darija, since it represented a breach of the old boundaries in which Standard Arabic was exclusively used for written purposes and the use of Darija was limited to the spoken domain. Nichane marked a transition of Darija from a spoken language to becoming both a spoken and written language. This development marked a decrease in the marginalization of Darija and a confirmation of its status (Ziamari and de Ruiter, 2016). Another step forward is Darija being used as a language of cultural creativity, and the emergence of a ‘Darija generation’ (term used by Caubet, 2006), predominantly in Casablanca and other big cities in Morocco where artists express themselves in Darija both orally and in writting. Other milestones in the use of Darija are its increased use in audio-visual media. Foreign soap series are dubbed in Darija (Ziamari and Barontini, 2013) and many programs are now using a language variety that was considered inappropriate before this development started. In publicity and marketing Darija has become a real competitor for Standard Arabic (Ziamari and de Ruiter, 2016). The factual Moroccan linguistic landscape is now characterized by billboards using written Darija to persuade potential clients to buy products or make use of (financial) services (Hoogland, 2013). Ziamari and de Ruiter (2016:458) conclude with the remark that the linguistic changes in Morocco are coming from the bottom up and that these changes are redefining the linguistic borders between what is official and what is not. The linguistic reality in Morocco is moving in a direction of enforcing vernacular language practices. As a result of these developments, Darija has more than ever become a visible part of the linguistic landscape in Morocco. It should therefore come as no surprise that in 2006, Ahmed Reda Benchemsi and Driss Ksikes, both involved in the creation and publication of the francophone independent weekly magazine TelQuel, wanted to influence the debate on the role of Darija in Moroccan society

DARIJA IN THE MOROCCAN PRESS 277 by making a statement, which consisted of starting an arabophone weekly magazine that would systematically use Darija in written form. In September 2006, the ﬁrst issue of Nichane appeared and the magazine continued to appear on a weekly basis (with some interruptions due to legal issues) until 1 October 2010, when it was discontinued, allegedly because of a lack of advertisement revenue.1 Thus Nichane also became part of Morocco’s linguistic landscape (Blommaert, 2013). When it appeared, it was present in kiosks and on tables in cafés. People were talking about it, mostly about the content of the articles, but in certain cases also about the language used. Hall (2015) reports on people even hiding copies of Nichane from their parents because of the allegedly offensive cover photos. The study I executed examines this period of four years, and focuses on the linguistic aspects of the language used in the content of this magazine. It should be noted, however, that the content of the articles, of which some were ground- breaking and sometimes became topics of public debate, is not the subject of this research.

3 The magazine Nichane

Ahmed Benchemsi and Driss Ksikes established the magazine Nichane in 2006. In the year 2010 I interviewed Benchemsi (Hoogland, 2010),2 and in response to my question on why Darija was used, he simply said that he was convinced that ‘it is the natural language of Moroccans’, a ‘real street language’ fit for ‘a political way of expression’ (Hoogland, 2010). Miller (2017:104) quotes Ksikes about the motives for using Darija in Nichane as follows: ‘My main idea was to show that Arabic could be an economic and a non-redundant language… We knew that we couldn’t create a written Darija from scratch but our goal was to accompany the movement toward the Moroccan language, to reach a clear project of codification, transcription and standardization.’ So both founders of Nichane wanted to prove that Darija could be used to report on serious topics in an official publication. Driss Ksikes became the first editor in chief of Nichane. His editorial in the first issue of Nichane (Ksikes, 2006) was entitled calāš nišan (Why Nichane?). In this editorial, Ksikes cites two main motives for starting this new arabophone magazine, and Hall (2015:236) translated his words into English as follows: ‘to spread progressive ideas such as freedom of expression, to stimulate a democratic debate among a non-French reading public, and to support the creation of a “new” Arabic language that breaks away from the academic and formal style of writing in Standard Arabic and that is closer to the spoken language of the street’.3 Ksikes relativized the use of Darija in his editorial:

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As for the magazine we asked ourselves: will we write it in Darija? No. We have to be very precise here. Darija is related to the oral: audio visual, musical creativity, theatre, etc. In writing, there is a place for Darija, for headers, things that have been said in the ﬁeld, for quotations of people in reports. If they have been speaking in Darija, there is no need to translate this into another language. But in writing you have to take care of the registers.

Ksikes was thus not advocating writing Nichane entirely in Darija. When he states ‘We asked ourselves’ he is referring not just to himself asking and answering that question but also apparently to his co-founder Benchemsi. The answer to that question was obviously negative as Nichane was not entirely written in Darija. Below I quote Benchemsi when he estimates Nichane to contain 20–25% Darija. Ahmed Benchemsi relativized the importance of Darija for the readership:

But people don’t buy Nichane because it is in Darija, or because we ﬁght for this idea. People do not buy Nichane as a militant act. They buy Nichane because they like it, or they do not like it. And they like it because of the cover stories and because of the scandal. Or they don’t buy it. (Hoogland, 2010)

Several publications on the difficulties, seizures by the authorities, legal proceed- ings and the like have appeared both in print and on the Internet. Miller (2012), Elinson (2013), Hall (2015) and Iddins (2015) mention several of these. One particular case deserves mention here: the so-called Darija legal process. In his editorial of 4 August 2007, Benchemsi directly addressed King Mohammed VI by asking what the king had precisely meant in a royal speech about the upcoming elections.4 Benchemsi uses Darija to address the king about the content of that speech, and also paraphrases in Darija a number of fragments from the royal speech, which of course had been delivered in Standard Arabic. After the publication of this editorial, Benchemsi was arrested and held in custody for questioning. Official charges were never brought, nor did a lawsuit ensue. According to Benchemsi, his arrest and questioning became the inaugural act of a national debate: what place to grant the mother tongue of Moroccans in relation to Standard Arabic, one of their official two languages. Nichane suddenly and unexpectedly stopped appearing in 2010, with the last issue, 268, coming out on 1 October 2010. According to Benschemsi in an editorial in TelQuel 442, this was allegedly the result of a financial boycott by big advertisers closely related to the political regime.

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4 Other studies on Nichane

I started to follow Nichane from its first issue (issue 78, 9 September 2006).5 It very soon became clear to me that although there was a certain amount of Darija in the articles in Nichane, the language used in the majority of its articles was Standard Arabic. Starting from the first issue, I began to indicate in selected articles with a highlighter pen all the utterances that were in Darija. In doing so, it became visually clear from that very first issue of Nichane that there were big differences between articles within the same issue in terms of the amount of Darija used. Hall (2015) came to a similar conclusion, which was in contrast to the impressions of her informants who reported intensive use of Darija. I had the same experience myself, with informants telling me that the new magazine was written in Darija. One could conclude that there is a difference in perception between professional linguists and readers without linguistic training with regard to the categorization of a text containing a limited quantity of Darija utterances. Miller (2017) makes a similar observation, concluding that people may perceive texts to be written in Darija even if only a few dialect markers are present in the text. During the interview with Nichane’s editor in chief Ahmed Benchemsi referred to earlier, I showed him some of the texts from my corpus, with highlighted Darija utterances, and I indicated to him that the portions of Darija differed greatly. Benchemsi said the desired percentage of Darija in Nichane should generally be between 20 and 25%. He literally said: ‘I’m betting on 75–80% Fusha, so 20–25% Darija, which is not a lot. I would love it to be the other way’ (Hoogland, 2010). However, since the end of Nichane’s publication, there seems to exist among the public a general idea that Nichane was only using Darija. Even Ahmed Benchemsi himself has contributed to this notion. He (Benchemsi, 2010) writes: ‘(…) a regime that did not like the positions of Nichane, even more because these positions were expressed in a language accessible to all’. It is obvious that Benchemsi was referring to Darija with this ‘language accessible to all’ remark. In the same article in TelQuel he states: ‘Nichane tells the same message, but this time in Arabic. Better: in Darija, the language of natural expression of the Moroc- cans’. Benchemsi is not a linguist, so again we can observe a difference between linguists’ and non-linguists’ evaluations. Even in TelQuel, of which Benchemsi was the editor in chief too, Benchemsi maintains the message that Nichane is a magazine written in Darija. At least, he does not nuance this statement by mentioning that in fact only a small part of the content is written in Darija.

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Reading the work of other researchers, one cannot escape the impression that they supported this general idea of Darija being the language of communication in Nichane. Morgan (2009:15) writes: ‘The Darija-language newspaper, Nishan’.6 Elinson (2013:718) writes that Nichane wrote extensively in Darija, relating it to the popularity of the magazine: ‘The critical coverage of topics people wanted to read about, in a language more widely understood than pure Standard Arabic, was an important factor in Nishan’s popularity’. In addition, a popular (but not academic) source like Wikipedia, in its lemma on Moroccan Arabic, states: ‘TelQuel Magazine started a Moroccan Arabic edition Nichane’.7 All these quotations point to this general idea that Nichane was written mostly or entirely in Darija. Miller (2012:424) analysed the language used by Nichane in comparison with other Moroccan press publications, and states that Nichane was the most striking symbol of the valorization of Darija in Morocco. Miller compares Nichane to a linguistic laboratory that is participating in a new journalistic style, which uses Darija beyond the expression of humour and popular wisdom. Hall (2015:241) conﬁrms though that the actual amount of Darija in Nichane is rather limited when she writes: ‘I will show that the “Moroccan Arabic magazine” was in reality mostly written in Standard Arabic with relatively limited Moroccan Arabic peppered throughout’. Miller (2011:2) discusses a category of Moroccan press publications that publish in Standard Arabic but add some Darija within certain rubrics, chronicles or titles in doses that are more or less ‘homeopathic’ as she calls it. Although she does not explain this metaphor, I believe it is clear what Miller means: texts containing a very low dose of Darija, almost negligible in terms of statistics. Miller does not count Nichane in this category of publications containing only negligible doses of Darija. For Miller, Nichane is from a different category, and I believe she is correct when she states:

Darija was never used in an exclusive and systematic way. Darija is used more systematically in Nichane than in other publications in headers, interviews (the gossip interview Tqarqib n-nab),8 in reported speech, humour etc. The language of Nichane is based on a mixture of languages (Modern Standard Arabic and Darija), but to a degree that is markedly superior in comparison to other Moroccan journals and in a much more systematic way. (Miller, 2011:3)9

It is clear what Miller means, and the combination of these two statements obviously leads to the conclusion that there is not much consistency in Nichane’s use of Darija and no consistency at all in the other journals. This will be conﬁrmed by the results from my analysis that is presented below.

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5 Corpus and procedures of the research

In order to analyse the language used in Nichane, I needed to create a represent- tative corpus of articles taken from various Nichane issues. A standard issue of Nichane contains one cover story that normally covers eight pages, three one- page columns, a small number (1–3) of one-page articles, approximately five to eight two-page articles, approximately twelve to fifteen pages with short pieces of news, one page with a gossip interview and approximately five to ten pages of advertisements. Most articles mention the name of the author, but I have also included in the corpus a number of pages with short news messages that are not attributed to a specific journalist. I have not included these messages separately but as a page of short messages. I have included one page of short messages from six different issues. The total number of words of these six pages is 3,200, so about 500 words per page. The final corpus consists of 110 texts taken from different parts of the magazine, such as editorials, columns, reports, interviews and cover stories written by various journalists covering a wide variety of topics on society, politics, culture, economy, history, technology and the like. I read all texts in the corpus and highlighted the Darija utterances in them. I have gathered statistical information about the texts in the corpus in order to establish the percentage of Darija incur- porated in the different articles.10 I applied the following procedures. For each separate text, the total number of words has been determined, not by counting all individual words, but by counting the number of lines and multiplying this by the average number of words in a line. Deviating lines have been taken into consi- deration by counting the actual number of words and not adding those lines to the total number of lines in the article. The total number of words of all the texts in the corpus is 103,963 words. The Darija words in every text have been counted one by one, not on the basis of the numbers of lines and average number of words per line, since in some cases the Darija expressions consist of only one word or just a few words. With the total number of words per text and the number of Darija words per text available, it is possible to calculate the percentage of Darija for every single text. If a part of a text could be read either as Darija or as Standard Arabic, I took a decision based on surrounding context as to whether a word was to be considered Darija or Standard Arabic. It is important to note that the total corpus is not fully representative of an average issue of Nichane since articles with a higher percentage of Darija are overrepresented in the corpus. I have estimated one issue of Nichane contains

282 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES about 18,000 words. Therefore, the corpus has the size of about six issues of Nichane. However, the corpus contains sixteen versions of the weekly ‘gossip’ interview ‘Tqarqib n-nab’, which is the type of article that contains a high percentage of Darija. Moreover, the corpus also contains fifteen versions of the editorial ‘Dīrīkt’ (‘Direct’) by Ahmed Benchemsi, and these editorials are also characterized by a significantly higher percentage of Darija. A regular issue of Nichane contains one editorial and one gossip interview, so after randomly removing superfluous gossip interviews and editorials from the corpus, there remains a corpus of 97,000 words which can be considered representative. We can look at the percentages of Darija in different types of articles or we can compare among journalists. The following three sections present the results of the analysis from three different perspectives. Evidently, the total corpus represents Nichane as a whole and deserves study, which is done in section 5.1. Since different authors, i.e. journalists, have different styles of writing, with possibly different patterns of Darija use, in section 5.2 I will differentiate between the various journalists who regularly wrote articles in Nichane. Different types of articles (columns, interviews, news reports) demand different writing styles and consequently may show varying degrees of Darija use. I will analyse this in section 5.3.

5.1 Percentages of Darija in the corpus The frequency of occurrence analysis reveals percentages of Darija ranging from 0% to 100%. In other words, there are some texts, ﬁve of them to be precise, that do not contain any Darija at all, and at the other extreme, we ﬁnd one text that is written entirely in Darija. This may seem an interesting observation, but obviously, because of their low frequency, these exceptional extremes are less important than values in between these extremes. Moreover, this is indeed where the interesting observations can be made. As already mentioned, Ahmed Benchemsi was aiming at a general percentage of Darija between 20 and 25%. The percentage in the corpus in total is 16%, 16,446 Darija words out of a total of 103,963 words, but the more representative corpus, as described above, contains an overall percentage of 12% Darija, which can be regarded as more reliably representative of the magazine. Probably the average percentage of Darija in any regular issue of Nichane will be within a range of 10–15%, so 10% less than what Benchemsi was striving for. Of the 29 texts with a percentage of 20% or higher, thirteen texts are gossip interviews and eight texts are editorials by Benchemsi. Therefore, eight texts are regular articles: seven are two-page articles and one is a cover story. These last data are summarized in Table 1: 29 texts containing 20% of Darija or higher.

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Table 1. Articles with 20% Darija or higher: types of articles and their number.

Gossip interviews 13 Editorials Benchemsi 8 Two page articles 7 Cover stories 1 Total 29

In my view, more interesting than overall percentages are the differences within categories like different authors or different types of articles.

5.2 Analysis by author Almost all articles in Nichane mention the name of the journalist who wrote the article. This information enabled me to create a list of authors and the texts written by them in the corpus (see Table 2). The unsigned articles are not part of the analysis by author. In the overview below, I present the names of the journalists and the number of texts written by these journalists that were included in the corpus. The third column mentions the average percentage of Darija in their texts; the fourth and ﬁfth columns show the highest and lowest values. The journalists whose articles are examined are only those with at least four articles in the corpus. I received information that Anis Eloumari is not a real person; this is a pseudo- nym used by various members of the editorial department to publish articles. I will not pay further attention to articles attributed to this name since various persons operated under this name and consequently the results will not be reliable for drawing conclusions. For Benchemsi, Elaji and Matrouf, I make a distinction between regular articles and columns or in the case of Matrouf between regular articles and the ‘gossip interviews’. This distinction is important because the different types of articles demand different styles of language. Especially in the case of Matrouf, we see a big difference in percentages between his articles (the average percentage of Darija is 19%) and the gossip interviews (77%). As indicated above, editor in chief Benchemsi strived for a percentage of Darija in Nichane of 20–25%. If we look at the average of the articles of the journalists mentioned in the table, we notice that only the following journalists meet with this desired percentage: Benchemsi himself in his editorials (28%) and Matrouf in the gossip interviews (77%). Both Matrouf (articles) and Najim are very close to the norm, both with 19%. However, the extremes and the distribution of the percentages are striking with these four journalists and deserve some additional explanation.

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Table 2. List of contributors of whom texts are in the corpus, the number of their texts, the average percentage of Darija in their texts and the lowest and highest percentage.

List of contributors Texts (N) Average (%) Low (%) High (%) Aouad Lahcen 6 6 1 11 Bellaouali Ismail 8 9 2 20 Benchemsi Ahmed, articles 2 6 6 9 Benchemsi Ahmed, editorials 15 28 3 100 El Hadef Azzedine 6 13 10 1 Elaji Sanae, column Batoul 8 7 0 11 Elaji Sanae, articles 8 11 2 26 Eloumari Anis 7 5 1 27 Khadiri Mohamed 5 9 4 17 Ksikes Driss 4 7 3 12 Matrouf Moussa 5 19 0 63 Matrouf Moussa, ‘gossip’ 8 77 48 94 Najim Ahmed 7 19 0 94

Benchemsi, in his editorials, realizes an average percentage of Darija of 28%, which is even higher than the desired percentage. However, there is one peculiar extreme of 100% in the list of his texts. Benchemsi wrote this editorial in issue 258, 25 June 2010, just after he participated in a conference about languages of Morocco, organized by the Zakoura foundation.11 In this conference, there were strong pleas for improving the status of Darija in Morocco. In my interview with Benchemsi, he said that he had had the feeling that he had to write that editorial totally in Darija to underline the pleas and arguments expressed during the conference. If we were to exclude this exceptional case from the calculation of the average, it would drop from 28% to 21%, which just ﬁts into Benchemsi’s own desired range of 20–25%. Still, the distribution of percentages in Benchemsi’s editorials covers a wide range with strong variation: 100–44–41–40–31–31–25– 21–19–15–15–14–5–4–3. Seven out of ﬁfteen texts have a percentage below the desired 20%. Two other texts written by Benchemsi command attention: there is a cover story about politics (3,300 words, 6% Darija) signed by him. This is a very low percentage for Benchemsi. Since this is a long article about King Mohammed VI, I assume that others wrote this cover story but Benchemsi as editor in chief signed it and took the editorial responsibility for it, in case of problems with the authorities that might arise because of the content of this article. Another text by Benchemsi contains only 9% Darija. It is a one-page sharp comment on one of the

DARIJA IN THE MOROCCAN PRESS 285 legal issues Nichane had to deal with, namely the seizure and destruction of all newly printed copies of a complete edition of both Nichane (and TelQuel) because it contained a popularity poll on King Mohammed VI. Benchemsi probably wrote this comment in French and then translated it into Arabic himself, as he regularly did. The gossip interviews (Tqarqib n-nab) by Moussa Matrouf form a special category. They are characterized by a high percentage of Darija. Hall (2015) reported on the characteristics of these interviews including the atmosphere they emanate. Given the stark contrast between the gossip interviews and the rest of the content of Nichane, it seems logical to treat these interviews as a separate category, just like the other categories. As indicated, both Najim’s and Matrouf’s articles are, with an average of 19%, very close to the minimum set by Benchemsi. Najim has extremes of 0% and 94%. The 94% is the second highest after Benchemsi’s 100% editorial described above, and this is very exceptional for a regular article. However, it is my assumption that this article, an interview with an actor, might have been intended as an interview in the ‘gossip interview’ series, but was too long for the gossip page and thus became a regular article in the magazine. If we were to exclude this text from the calculation of Najim, his average percentage would drop from 19% to 9%. Matrouf, in his regular articles, also has a wide range, from 0% to 63%, and an average of 19% Darija. The highest value of 63% is realized in a text on the use of environmentally unfriendly plastic bags. This text is not an interview; there is only one quotation of direct speech, so we might consider this a regular article that contains 63% Darija. Just like Benchemsi’s 100% editorial, this is a remarkable case. The whole corpus contains ﬁfteen texts with a percentage of Darija of 50% or higher. Apart from the three special cases described here, Benchemsi’s editorial after Darija conference, Najim’s interview with an actor, and Matrouf’s text on the environment issue, the other twelve texts with more than 50% Darija are ‘gossip interviews’. Another journalist who deserves attention is Azzedine El Hadef. The corpus contains six articles written by him and striking in his percentages of Darija is the moderate variance. His average percentage is 13%, but he is rather stable since there are no extremes: 18–16–15–13–11–10. One might feel tempted to say his style of using Darija could have been a role model for other journalists of Nichane. As we have seen, variation in percentages of Darija can even vary within the texts written by one author. The type of article authors wrote can cause this variation. This leads us to the following section where different types of articles are studied.

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5.3 Analysis by type of article Several types of articles have already been mentioned above: editorials by Benchemsi, columns by Elaji, gossip interviews by Matrouf, cover stories and regular articles by various journalists. The longest articles are the cover stories, most of which consist of 1,600–1,700 words. The regular two-page articles mostly count 1,000–1,100 words. Other types of texts are editorials by Driss Ksikes or Ahmed Benchemsi (500 words), the column Batoul (a girls’ name) by Sanae Elaji (about 550 words) and the ‘gossip’ interview Tqarqib n-nab counting 550–600 words. As for the cover stories, the corpus contains twelve of these long articles, containing a total of 23,000 words and approximately 100 pages, since most cover stories are eight pages long. In all these cover stories together, there are 1,800 words in Darija, i.e. 8%. If we look at the distribution of the percentages in these cover stories, we notice that the highest percentage is 20%. It is only this text that meets the desired percentage; the next closest to it contains only 14% Darija. The distribution of percentages in all cover stories in the corpus is as follows: 20–14–12–12–10–6– 6–4–3–3–2–0. So one cover story contains no Darija at all, and this appears to be the cover story of the very ﬁrst issue of Nichane, the topic of which is ‘Islamists within the Army’. Apparently, the editors were not ready for the ﬁrst issue to conform with their ambitions. A closer look at the cover stories with the highest percentages of Darija (10% or higher) shows that the majority of Darija utterances in the cover stories are quotations of informants; the aim of the journalists was to report direct speech in a direct and literal way. There is one exception to this; the cover story of Nichane 262 (23 July 2010), written by Ismail Bellaouali about the relation of the Muslim Brotherhood to the late King Hassan II and the late Saudi King Fahd. This article contains 12% Darija and there are only a few citations; most of the Darija utterances are part of the argumentation of this text. In general, it is my impression that most of Nichane’s cover stories will be remembered for their revealing and controversial content and not so much for the high ratio of Darija in the stories. In terms of length, the cover stories are at one end of the scale and short news items are at the other. According to Hall, these short texts tend to contain the least amount of Darija, although she formulated it the other way: texts with no or little Darija tend to be short articles. However, I have my reservations about this. In these short news items, I found 192 Darija words, i.e. 6%. The percentages range from 3% to 11%.

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Regular two-page articles form a major part of every issue of Nichane, since every issue comprises ﬁve to eight of these articles. The corpus contains 50 articles of this type, with an average length of 1,089 words and an average percentage of Darija of 11%. These texts show the usual spread of percentages: from 94% to 0%. The case of 94% has been discussed before (Najim’s interview with an actor, probably originally intended for the gossip interview section). Of these 50 articles, only seven contain 20% Darija or more, and 30 texts contain less than 10% Darija. The overview from the Table 3 summarizes the types of articles.

Table 3. Types of texts and percentages of Darija. Total number of texts of each type, percentages of Darija per type and number of texts with at least 20% Darija of each type.

Type of text Total N of texts of Average % Darija N of texts with this type at least 20% Darija Cover stories 12 8 1 Two-page articles 50 11 7 Editorial Benchemsi 14 28 7 Gossip interview 14 70 13

I have already mentioned a number of texts that do not contain any Darija at all. I assume Ahmed Benchemsi considered a percentage less than 20% as ‘little’, but, as we have noticed, he himself did not meet that standard in a part of his texts. However, for the sake of completeness: 81 of 110 texts contain less than 20% Darija. Or should we consider less than 10% Darija as little? Fifty-three of 110 texts contain less than 10% Darija. In these lowest ranks, we ﬁnd cover stories, regular articles, editorials and short news articles. As for the pragmatic functions of Darija in the articles, I have analysed the utterances in Darija in almost half of the corpus and noticed a number of recurrent functions performed by Darija in different articles. These functions are: reporting direct speech; header/title; (short) comment by the author, as a statement or as a question; explanatory addition; closing remark as statement or question. Since the present publication is limited in size and scope, I intend to treat in more detail in another publication how Darija is used pragmatically in Nichane to perform these functions, and there I will investigate if the pragmatic use of Darija in Nichane is systematic.

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6 Conclusion

This article aimed to give answers to the following two questions: 1. To what extent does Nichane use Darija in its content? 2. How does the magazine Nichane ﬁt in and contribute to the debate on Darija in Morocco?

As for the use of Darija in Nichane, I summarize the results as follows. In this research, I have supplied statistics about the percentages of Darija in more than a hundred articles from Nichane, taken from 31 different issues that appeared during a period of four years, and from these statistics I conclude that only very few articles contain a percentage of 20–25% Darija as desired by its editor in chief Ahmed Benchemsi. But, as my research results show, the amount of Darija in Nichane is, in most articles, very limited. From the corpus of 110 texts, only 29 contain an amount of Darija that is equal to or higher than 20%. Benchemsi himself wrote eight of these 29 texts. In general, there is extensive variation in the percentage of Darija between articles of the same type, or between journalists, or even between different articles written by the same journalist, since the range is from 0% to 100%. As both initiators of the journal Benchemsi and Ksikes expressed, Nichane was started in order to serve as a means for promoting the position of Darija in Moroccan society and to show that Darija can be used to write about serious topics in a serious publication. Given the lack of consistency in the ratio of Darija in the articles in the Nichane corpus, I conclude that the use of Darija in a printed magazine was an experiment that was not very successful, since very few articles contain 20% of Darija or more. Though Hall (2015) is correct in her general impression about Nichane, i.e. that is made up of mostly Standard Arabic ‘peppered’ with some Darija, when she goes more into details, she comes to some in my view inaccurate observations: ‘the lead cover stories also tended to have a lot of Moroccan Arabic’ (Hall, 2015:252). Although Hall did not deﬁne what she considers ‘a lot’, my evaluation is that 8% certainly is not a high rate and it is a fact that these cover stories are far below 20–25% of Darija, the norm set by Ahmed Benchemsi, and it is probably also less than what Hall would consider ‘a lot’. Hall continues with: ‘Articles in Nichane with little or no Moroccan Arabic tended to be short articles that had no by-line and were not attributed to any one author’ (Hall, 2015:252, 253). This observation is not in accordance with my ﬁndings: in these short news items I found percentages of Darija ranging from 3% to 11%. Miller (2017:106) is correct in many of her observations concerning Nichane, but when she states that it was only Ahmed Benchemsi who used Darija in his editorials and that most of the other Nichane journalists wrote predominantly in

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Standard Arabic, I have demonstrated above that other journalists also used Darija (in varying degrees). It is true that Benchemsi uses Darija the most in his editorials (28%), but Mousa Matrouf has an average of 77% in the gossip interviews and 19% in his regular articles, equal to Ahmed Najim who also uses 19% Darija. Azzedine El Hadef uses 13% en Sanae Elaji 11%. I have illustrated that the use of Darija in Nichane was not very systematic or consistent, but one could make the excuse that forerunners and pioneers have no role models to follow. The fact that the language policy of Nichane may seem a bit messy conforms with findings of Cenoz and Gorter (2006), who observed the linguistic landscape in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands and in Bilbao, Basque country. They analysed the written use of the two minority languages Frisian and Basque in two streets in these two cities and observed a rather messy situation in terms of consistency in language choice and language use. The linguistic landscape is a demonstration of spontaneous language use by language users without any interference from authorities, language planners or linguistic experts (Blommaert, 2013). The same applied for the magazine Nichane. As for the role of Nichane in the debate on the status of Darija in Morocco, I conclude that Nichane certainly did play a role and some results were achieved, since the initiators have proven during a period of four years that the realization of their intention was possible, with all the reservations mentioned above. Thus they have disproved Miller’s conclusion (2017:106) that journalistic writings are a domain that is not suitable for the use of Darija. In addition to the fact that Nichane existed for four years, it was the was the most sold and most read Arabic weekly magazine in Morocco, according to Benchemsi (Hoogland, 2010). However, when Nichane was discontinued in 2010, there was no other printed publication to continue this development and become a suitable and sustainable successor. The fact that in printed press no new similar initiatives (i.e. an independent journal or magazine) have been started since 2010 contributes to the conclusion that the Nichane experiment was not very successful given the lack of imitation or succession through new initiatives. Therefore, the disappearance of Nichane meant a real setback for Darija in Morocco. Miller (2011) concludes that in 2011 the presence of Darija in the Moroccan printed press was in regression. In 2017 I can state that this situation has not substantially changed since. However, in stark contrast to the printed press, we do find on the Internet many initiatives that use written Darija: one of these is the site www.goud.ma that was started in 2010 by some of the journalists from Nichane. Caubet (2017), Elinson (2017) and Miller (2017) describe other utilizations of written Darija that have continued to develop since 2010. Hachimi (2017:244) confirms this when she states: ‘The unprecedented circulation of Darija through lyrics video is unmatched by any

290 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES other form of written Darija offline, and raises new and important sociolinguistic questions’. These developments show that the process of emancipation of Darija certainly did not come to an end when Nichane stopped. An interesting example to illustrate this continuing process is the monolingual dictionary of Moroccan Arabic by Mgharfaoui and others, published by the Fondation Zakoura in 2017. In this dictionary the meaning of Darija words is explained in Darija. It is still too early to evaluate the position of this remarkable monolingual dictionary of the colloquial language, which is probably the first of its kind in the Arab world. When the dictionary was published it aroused a strong debate in Morocco, but the already mentioned Noureddine Ayyouche, founder of the Zakoura foundation, is convinced of the usefulness of projects involving Darija and quietly realizes his plans without letting the debates prevent him from reaching his goals. This is in line with Høigilt’s observation that ‘today’s publications simply go ahead with their radical writing practices, against orthodoxy, without making a fuss about it or even reflecting much on it ‒ they just do what feels best and most authentic for their rhetorical purposes’ (Høigilt, 2017:184). As for the future of Darija in written form in Morocco, I agree with Iddins, who states: ‘The chance that Darija will enter into the realms of power seems less likely than ever when an advertising boycott by one of the king’s holding companies forces Nichane to close’ (Iddins, 2015:296). This observation will certainly influence those who consider similar initiatives and make them think twice before they start investing time and money. However, I do believe it was not the use of Darija that formed the basic reason of Nichane being so unpopular with the authorities. Rather, this was caused by the topics of its famous cover articles and the positions Nichane took in these articles. The future will show what will happen with Darija in the Moroccan press. Nevertheless, the debate about the position and role of Darija in society continues, and the efforts of Benchemsi and Ksikes, both in their role as journalists and as activists and advocates for Darija, have contributed significantly to this debate.

Notes

1. Soon after its first appearance Nichane became the most read Arabic weekly magazine. In its final days around 20,000 copies were sold every week. According to Elinson (2013:718) Nichane had become Morocco’s top selling magazine. During this four-year period there were some interruptions because of legal matters and conflicts with the Moroccan authorities on certain articles in some issues. 2. The interview took place in English, so all quotations are literal quotations of Benchemsi’s words. 3. Hall’s translation into English (2015:236).

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4. Editorial available online at: janhoogland.com. 5. It may seem strange that the ﬁrst issue has number 78, but this is the actual number of the ﬁrst issue. 6. Both Morgan and Ellinson use the spelling ‘Nishan’ for the name of the magazine. 7. Retrieved on 5 September 2017 from: https://en.wikipedia.orġwiki/TelQuel. 8. The section Tqarqib Nnab (literally ‘rattling of teeth’ but known as ‘gossip’) is a one-page interview on the last page of Nichane magazine. The interviewee is almost always a person from the Moroccan cultural scene and the style of the interview is informal. 9. My translation from French into English. 10. A description of the corpus, summing up all the articles, their authors, the size and the like is available on my website: janhoogland.com 11. Fondation Zakoura Education (2010).

About the author

Jan Hoogland is lecturer of Arabic at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Nether- lands. He is founder (2006) and former director (2009–2015) of the Netherlands’ Academic Institute (NIMAR) in Rabat, Morocco. His research focuses on the position of Moroccan Arabic in Moroccan society and lexicography of Moroccan Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA).

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(Received May 2016; revision received October 2017; accepted November 2017; ﬁnal revision received 10th January 2018)