Moroccan Arabic on billboards and posters: An analysis from Linguistic Landscape Studies and language policy

Abstract

Morocco's new social, political and economic context has propitiated the emergence of new linguistic practices in Moroccan Arabic (MA) in public and private spaces, and has thus given rise to a new sociolinguistic reality. This paper examines the use of MA in the Linguistic Landscape in Morocco from two perspectives, urban sociolinguistics and language policy  in relation to the construction of space. For this purpose, the paper first discusses this new sociopolitical, economic and linguistic context in which the use of MA and its written modality emerged. It then outlines the theoretical and methodological framework used to analyse the corpus of data within what is known as Linguistic Landscape Studies. Thirdly, it analyzes a corpus of data comprising signs, posters, advertisements, billboards and other inscriptions using MA found in a specific space, the Hamriya neighborhood in the city of Meknes. Among the conclusions, these practices in MA are linked to the reconfiguration of the Moroccan sociolinguistic system and also to the transformations occurring in the construction of ethnolinguistic identities, both individual and collective.