Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

“#Your lyrics do not represent my Moroccan dialect”:
Sociolinguistic change, gender and the pop music industry in the Arabic-speaking world

Invited Speaker: Atiqa Hachimi – University of Toronto
Atiqa Hachimi is a sociolinguist and Arabic specialist whose teaching contributes to the programs for Women’s and Gender Studies and African Studies. Her research focuses on social and language change in the Arabic-speaking world, particularly in Morocco.
https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/hcs/atiqa-hachimi

Abstract: North African Arabic varieties have long been subordinated vis-à-vis their Middle Eastern counterparts: the former are often presented as linguistically impure, unintelligible, and the most distant from the more authentic Standard Arabic. One example of this sociolinguistic hierarchy— “the Maghreb-Mashreq language ideology” (Hachimi 2013)—is when North African performing artists sing in Middle Eastern Arabic varieties in order to make their music marketable across the Arabic-speaking world. Yet, despite this hierarchy, over the last decade it has become more common among famous Middle Eastern performing artists and producers to compose songs in North African varieties, especially in Moroccan Arabic—triggering some support by the Moroccan public but also much opposition, especially over the inappropriate choice of the lyrics used in these songs. This talk will centre on a controversial song written and performed in Moroccan Arabic by prominent Middle Eastern musicians, specifically the song’s use of a Moroccan youth slang term for “girl”. Drawing on Moroccans’ digital metapragmatic discourse, I argue that folk debates about the slang term’s meanings and origin stories reveal important contestations over gender, class and sexual morality, thus helping to enregister certain ways of speaking with specific social types. Theoretically, the paper builds on “strategies of condescension” (Bourdieu 1991), “orders of indexicality” (Silverstein 2003), and the tropes of “pride” and “profit” (Heller and Duchêne 2012) to conceptualize the complex stance-taking to symbolic acts of negating the power relationship between Moroccan and Middle Eastern Arabic varieties in this globalized moment, highlighting the long history of othering of Moroccan women in Middle Eastern representations, who can be presented as “morally loose”/prostitutes in the Arabic-speaking world.

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