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gothhabiba · 1 year ago

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i dont get why they would try and make it uniform when u can play w linguistic variation ? like in american media giving characters regional accents and dialects of english can add some interest to characterization n whatever. altho i guess the feeding into stereotypes would be an obvious consequence [shrug emoji] something to fink about ! (tags via @gommyworm)

I feel that, unfortunately, this dissertation is heavy on fact collation and light on analysis. I suspect that the desire to have a "good, clean" Darija as a broadcast language, devoid of 'regional' features (and even devoid of some specifically Moroccan features, relying more on Arabic-derived than French-derived terms), has to do with the educational role that many Moroccans feel broadcasting in Darija ought to have—that is, it should not encourage people to speak 'worse' Darija or 'lower' the 'quality' of Darija spoken, but rather should model "good" Darija:

[...] [A] number of women I spoke to in Casablanca have emphasized that the Moroccan Arabic used to dub the foreign series on 2M is a ‘clean, good’ (nqia, mezyana) variety of Moroccan Arabic that one can hear in the nicer, urban areas such as Casablanca. These women recognized multiple registers of Arabic in Casablanca. For these women, the variety used in dubbing contrasts with “ddarija dyal zzenqa,” a variety they associate with foul language, rudeness and a lack of education. They explain that spreading a “clean” register of urban Moroccan Arabic by means of popular TV series will have a positive influence on listeners, particularly children and those who do not have a strong command of Moroccan Arabic. (Hall, p. 202)

Thus, the Darija used should belong to prestige varieties; there may be an association of prestige language with universality, and of the strongly regional with the 3rubi (rural), uneducated, and particular (Hall notes that lower-prestige varieties of casawi / Casablancan Darija are associated with in-migrants to Casablanca from rural areas). This association of the identifiably regional with low prestige can be perhaps seen in Chraïbi's statement that the language used should be "ni trop casablancaise, ni trop fassie, ni trop chamalie, ni trop vulgaire." (This doesn't mean that prestige varieties are not regionally specific—just that there is a fantasy that they are not.) The (aspired-to) removal of regional markers and the removal of swear words should be read as related projects.

This may also have to do with the national role that Darija is imagined to play. Hall mentions that Moroccans consider Darija to be a lingua franca, despite the fact that they do note (and have judgements on) regional variation, and despite the fact that not all Moroccans speak Darija (there are many monolingual Tamazight spreakers in the country). Desiring the adoption of one, "good, clean," uniform Darija that can serve as the common linguistic property (and thus part of the identity) of the nation of Morocco as a whole seems like a natural corollary to desiring the removal of foreign (e.g. French, Spanish, Syrian, or Lebanese) loanwords. Of a Moroccan man who stated that shows dubbed in Moroccan Arabic were a chance to "améliorer Darija":

He argued that foreign languages were having too great an influence on Moroccan Arabic and as such, it needed to be ‘cleaned and fixed.’ He gave the example of the words “tomobil” ‘car’ and “cusina” ‘kitchen’ as examples of French influence in Moroccan Arabic. “Tout le monde disent tomobil, meme les alphabets” ‘everyone says tomobil, even the literate.’ By this he insinuates that those literate in Arabic should know better and instead use a word of Standard Arabic origin such as “siya:ra” to refer to car when speaking in Moroccan Arabic. (Hall, p. 203)

I argue elsewhere that "given that shows dubbed in Moroccan Arabic are to teach the public 'good' spoken Darija, they can be analysed in terms of how the ethos of Arabisation connects education with nation: 'generaliz[ing] the Arabic language' in order to both 'democratiz[e] access to education and affirm[] the Arab identity of the Kingdom' (Youssef Sourgo, Morocco World News). And Arabisation also, of course, paradoxically relies on looking outside Morocco in order to institute Morocco’s 'Moroccanization'" (given the hiring of foreign teachers to teach Arabic in the years immediately surrounding Moroccan independence). If "generalizing" Arabic (read: making Standard Arabic generally understood throughout Morocco) has this kind of national role, it makes sense to posit that "generalizing" Darija (and turning to Standard Arabic to do so; other languages are seen as foreign pollutants to Darija in a way that MSA is not) might, as well.

In the latter case, "generalizing" refers both to widespread distribution ("a Moroccan Arabic translation would be understood by 'all' Moroccans") and the generalized, universalized language necessary to make this widespread distribution legible to all speakers of Darija ("a neutral or an unmarked variety of Moroccan Arabic that 'everybody' could listen to and understand" must be "create[d]"). The use of language to create and police national boundaries based on ethnicity can be seen in the ready elision between "everybody who speaks [any variety of] Darija" and "everybody," period.

I might further connect this to the recent production of a "standard" Tamazight (a combination of three main Amazigh languages) and the mandate that this "inauthentic" standard variety be taught in all public schools in the country. Hall analyses the ideological relationship between various languages of Morocco in terms of "fractual recursivity"; MSA is better for writing and communicating than Darija, but within Darija, certain varieties are better for communicating than others; between Darija and Tamazight, Darija is better for writing and communicating; we might extend this and posit that within Tamazight, certain varieties (namely, the standarized variety created by IRCAM) are better than others. Because standardization implies central (national / royal) control over the habits of speakers of popular languages, there is something about it that innately produces "better" versions of a language (that is, the prestige of certain varieties over others for socioeconomic reasons may have something to do with it, but the testimony to power involved in producing a standard variety at all is in large part the point). 2M is a broadcasting company, not a government agency, but we can imagine them to be having the same kind of fantasy of linguistic control and influence.

tl;dr: I think it's about nationalism and also about being up MSA's ass.

Plug-in’s [company hired by Moroccan broadcasting company 2M to dub foreign media] team included translators who wrote scripts in Moroccan Arabic, Standard Arabic and French. Plug-in co-director Chraïbi explained that “Nous avons dû ‘créer’ un nouveau langage… une nouvelle darija, qui ne soit ni trop casablancaise, ni trop fassie, ni trop chamalie, ni trop vulgaire” (Ziraoui 2009), ‘we had to create a new language… a new Moroccan Arabic, that isn’t too Casablancan, too Fessi, too Northern or too vulgar’ (my translation). For example, curse words in the original language recording were not translated into the curse words commonly associated with the speech of inner city Casablanca residents, but instead were changed or removed altogether. This ideology that the work at Plug-in consisted of creating a neutral or an unmarked variety of Moroccan Arabic that “everybody” could listen to and understand was one I heard repeatedly from voice actors and staff at Plug-in. It was a position that aligned with the generally held ideology discussed in Chapter 1 that Moroccan Arabic was the lingua franca of Morocco. As shown earlier in the present chapter, however, the observation was made by viewers that the variety of Moroccan Arabic used in dubbing was not neutral, for various reasons, including that it was marked too strongly as Casablancan and that the lexical items chosen were ‘dirty’ and ‘rough.’ Indeed, the fact that there are no ideologically “neutral” translations, in that all translations involve the negotiation and discursive construction of social and linguistic relations of power, is one that has long been recognized by linguists and anthropologists (Jaffe 1999b). The basic assumption by Plug-in that a Moroccan Arabic translation would be understood by “all” Moroccans[] erased a significant body of viewers who were monolingual Tamazight speakers. My question to employees at Plug-in if serious consideration was ever given to creating a Tamazight translation of a foreign series was met with laughter and incredulity.

— Jennifer Lee Hall, Debating Darija: Language Ideology and the Written Representation of Moroccan Arabic in Morocco (PhD dissertation), 2015, pp. 210-11

Jaffe, Alexandra 1999b Locating Power: Corsican Translators and Their Critics. In Language Ideological Debates. J. Blommaert, ed. Language, Power and Social Process, Vol. 2. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Ziraoui, Youssef 2009 Darija. Série Je T’aime, Série Je T’adore.

#Darija #Tamazight #Arabisation

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