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

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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] SOLS VOL 12.2 2018 273–293 https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.35567 © 2019, EQUINOX PUBLISHING 274 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES 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 develop- ments 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. DARIJA IN THE MOROCCAN PRESS 275 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 impor- tant 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 develop- ment 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 maga- zine 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).
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