Sociolinguistic ISSN: 1750-8649 (print) Studies ISSN: 1750-8657 (online) Article Arabic kinship terms revisited: The rural and urban context of North-Western Morocco Amina Naciri-Azzouz Abstract This article reports on a study that focuses on the different kinship terms collected in several places in north-western Morocco, using elicitation and interviews conducted between March 2014 and June 2015 with several dozens of informants aged between 8 and 80. The analysed data include terms from the urban contexts of the city of Tetouan, but most of them were gathered in rural locations: the small village of Bni Ḥlu (Fahs-Anjra province) and different places throughout the coastal and inland regions of Ghomara (Chefchaouen province). The corpus consists of terms of address, terms of reference and some hypocoristic and affective terms. KEYWORDS: KINSHIP TERMS, TERMS OF ADDRESS, VARIATION, DIALECTOLOGY, MOROCCAN ARABIC (DARIJA) Affiliation University of Zaragoza, Spain email: [email protected] SOLS VOL 12.2 2018 185–208 https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.35639 © 2019, EQUINOX PUBLISHING 186 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES 1 Introduction The impact of migration ‒ attributable to multiple and diverse factors depending on the period ‒ is clearly noticeable in northern Morocco. Migratory movements from the east to the west, from rural areas to urban centres, as well as to Europe, has resulted in a shifting rural and urban population in this region. Furthermore, issues such as the increasing rate of urbanization and the drop in mortality have altered the social and spatial structure of cities such as Tetouan and Tangiers, where up to the present time some districts are known by the name of the origin of the population who settled down there: e.g. l-ḥawma dǝ-rwāfa ‘the Riffian quarter’, in reference to Riffians from the Berber-speaking Rif.1 One of the immediate results of internal migration is contact between speakers of different varieties of Moroccan Arabic and even other languages. The outcome of dialect contact can be linguistic change, which not only results in levelling towards the prestigious variety, but also in the emergence of new varieties and new linguistic practices (Miller, 2007:7). The latest linguistic research on north- western Morocco highlights levelling and linguistic change phenomena, though a systematic analysis is still pending. For instance, Vicente (2009) already points to the emergence of a new urban variety in the Arabic-speaking city of Tetouan. The purpose of this article is to discuss Arabic kinship terms in north-western Morocco, in particular in the region known as Jbala, including Ghomara,2 shown in Map 1. I focus on variation between the countryside and the city, as well as between younger and older people, in order to formulate a response to the follow- ing major question: How is dialect contact, in itself a result of socio-economic changes taking place in north-western Morocco, affecting kinship terms? Map 1. Traditional tribal map (Vignet-Zunz, 1995:2). ARABIC KINSHIP TERMS IN RURAL / URBAN MOROCCO 187 This article argues, through a dialectological and sociolinguistic analysis of kinship terms and their system of address, that kinship terms are affected by linguistic change in progress in two directions: 1) a shift to more prestigious variants, and 2) the loss and simplification of the use of kinship terms. Sections 2 and 3 describe kinship terms in Morocco and where and how data were recorded. The following section (section 4), divided into nine subsections, discusses kinship terms and their uses – including terms of reference, terms of address and their variation, as well as hypocoristic forms and affective terms – in an urban context, namely in Tetouan and the Spanish autonomous city of Ceuta,3 and a rural context, namely in Bni Ḥlu, in the province of Fahs-Anjra and in several locations along the coast and inland of Ghomara, in the province of Chefchaouen. Section 5 contains the conclusions of the study, presenting some evaluative remarks. 2 Research on kinship in Morocco Research on kinship in Morocco to elucidate social structures is particularly profuse. From Robertson-Smith (1885) and Montagne (1930) onwards, kinship has been considered the principle of social organization in North Africa and the Middle East (Aixelà, 2000:60).4 Consequently, the abundant literature produced throughout the 20th century focused on describing and defining Moroccan social structures around family, as ‘family and kinship are the cornerstones of society, its main structural elements’ (González Vázquez, 2010:365; my translation). From the seventies on, some theories frame social change along the lines of nuclearization, with reference to the process of transition from an extended family to a nuclear one being a direct result of the rapid urbanization of Morocco and to explain the developments in Moroccan society in the context of a new nation- state. In this regard, see, for example, work by scholars such as Fatima Mernissi (cf. Aixelà, 2000:82–85). Mateo Dieste (2013) reviews the concept of nuclearization and applies it to the case of transnational northern Moroccan families in order to demonstrate how the process of nuclear homes does not necessarily mean a weakening of kinship ties. Dieste (2013:417; my translation) accepts the fact that ‘a process of nuclearization of the families’ residence has indeed taken place […] though this transformation, mainly in terms of space, has not necessarily involved a reduction in the weight of lineages and of the extended family in key matters such as marriage and the economic subsistence of the unit’. In the case of Morocco, studies of nuclear homes are predominant over those of nuclear families in the literature. González Vázquez (2010:406–419) for example applies this approach in the case of Jbala, where ‘[…] the most frequent 188 SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDIES factors which may have had an impact on the formation of nuclear homes are migrations, the death of certain members of the family unit, the incorporation of certain family members into wage-earning jobs, demographic pressure, poverty and conflicts’. The purpose of this article is not to investigate the consequences of the above transformations on family structure and relations in terms of power and solidarity, but rather to use the concept of nuclearization in order to explain some uses of kinship terms, particularly terms of address, since the formation of nuclear homes has reduced contacts between some members of the family, and consequently some kinship terms linked to respect, solidarity and affection may have been reduced, as will be shown in section 4. 3 Corpus and methodology The data that were collected for this study originate from different locations in north-western Morocco (see Map 2).5 The Arabic spoken in this region belongs to a no-Hilali type. In Moroccan Arabic (also known as Darija) two strata of Arabic have been identified from a historical perspective: the non-Hilali (or pre-Hilali) sedentary Arabic that came about in different periods from the first arabicization wave starting in the 17th century; and the Hilali dialects or Bedouin dialects linked to the arrival of the Bānū Hilāl, Bānū Maʕqīl and Bānū Sulaym Bedouin tribes from the 12th century. North-western Morocco dialects are grouped within non- Hilali dialects and can be divided into urban dialects, such as the traditional urban dialects of Tangiers and Tetouan, also called Mdini dialects, and rural dialects, known as Jebli dialects. Nowadays, they would all shape the so-called l-haḍṛa š- šamāliyya, that is, the western ‘northern variety’ (cf. Sánchez and Vicente, 2012). The corpus was compiled through elicitation, semi-structured interviews, spontaneous conversations and participant observation. To achieve this, I stayed in the region on different occasions from March 2014 to June 2015 within the framework of my doctoral thesis on Ghomara Arabic varieties. Most often I stayed in family homes and was therefore able to witness the use of kinship terms within different contexts. A significant part of the corpus was recorded in different locations of Ghomara, in the province of Chefchaouen, which is made up of a group of nine tribes situ- ated east of Tetouan between the rivers Laou and Ouringa. On the Mediterranean coast, data were recorded in Qāʕ Asrās, a coastal village 55 kilometres from Tetouan in the rural commune of Tizgane (abbreviated TI on Map 2; see here below). In this case, data were provided by an extended family living in indepen- dent dwellings on the same plot of land (see Table 1). This family consisted specifically of two elderly parents living alone in one house, and five sons who ARABIC KINSHIP TERMS IN RURAL / URBAN MOROCCO 189 had built their respective houses on the same plot of land; one other son was living in another rural commune and one daughter lived in Tetouan. Furthermore, many of their neighbours are family relations, the entire family having moved to the plain, ḷūṭa, from somewhere up in the mountains in the early 20th century. In Tables 1 to 6 (see here below), I present the informants whose speech I recorded during the sessions of elicitation. Table 1. Social profile of the informants from Tizgane (TI). Informants Age Educational level TI 1 ~ 77-year-old man Illiterate TI 2 ~ 60-year-old woman Illiterate TI 3 ~ 53-year-old man Quran school TI 4 ~ 38-year-old woman Illiterate TI 5 ~ 33-year-old man Primary school TI 6 18-year-old woman University student TI 7 15-year-old man Student TI 8 8-year-old child Student Inland, I recorded data in the rural communes of Bni Selmane and Bab Berred (abbreviated respectively BS and BB on Map 2; see here below). In Bni Selmane (see Table 2) I compiled data from a čar close to Khmis M’diq ‒ čar is the name given to the most elementary dwelling units in the zone ‒ where the model of the extended family is the rule.