The Impact of Topic on Hybrid Forms: The Case of Arabic in Morocco

Résumé 0

One of the basic and well-established developments of Arabic diglossia is the notion of continuum, which was proposed by linguists who were critical of Ferguson’s classic model to reflect the existence of more than two varieties between the poles of pure H and pure L. Studies done on spoken Arabic in Morocco (Youssi 1983, 1995, Afkir 2015) or in other Arabic speech communities (Blanc 1960, Badawi 1973, Bassiouney 2006, Mejdell 2006) have all shown that Arabic language variation is to be viewed as a hierarchy of ‘levels’ or ‘varieties’ between the poles of pure H and pure L. The Arabic forms which mix features from both Standard Arabic (SA) and Moroccan Arabic (MA) are referred to as ‘hybrid’, ‘mixed’, and ‘intermediate’ forms. The present study seeks to explore to what extent the variable of topic has an impact on Moroccan speakers’ shifts to these hybrid forms. The data consists of 24 000 words produced in television panel discussions. This type of programs was chosen because it constitutes a semi-formal or ‘hybrid context’ (Eid 2007) where one may expect speakers to move along the diglossic continuum and produce mixed Arabic. The choice of one of the different varieties of Arabic is certainly motivated by shifting value systems attached to them and by their social meaning to the Moroccan speech community. The frequency-based quantitative analysis in this study has revealed that in addition to all these variables that are at play when codes interact, topic stands out as a variable that also predicts a specific form of Arabic. More importantly, hybridity is constrained by the way a given topic fits in the communicative habits of a speech community and should hence be approached within the framework of the socio-cultural context of the latter.