Patois

Abstract

Beginning in the 2000s, Morocco witnessed a surge of publications written in a supposedly oral language: Moroccan Arabic (dārija). This paper investigates the language ideology that undergirded these vernacular texts by focusing on a handful of language activists—writers, translators, editors, and publishers—who were involved in the production. Through an analysis of activists’ rhetoric, I show how they discursively constructed Moroccans as “linguistic schizophrenics” suffering from a fundamental misrecognition of standard Arabic (fuṣḥā) as their “mother tongue.” Against this background, activists saw texts in dārija, Moroccans’ “real mother tongue,” as potential cures with the power to wake up Moroccans to their lived linguistic contradictions—and to societal contradictions more broadly.

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