Written Moroccan Arabic on the internet: types of variation and levels of regularity
Authors
- Marcin MICHALSKI (PL) Universidad Adami Mickiewicz en Poznań
Abstract
For some time, Moroccan Arabic has been more and more extensively used in writing in various areas of the Internet: whether by ordinary Internet users, more or less amateur authors of expository texts aimed at the general public (the Wikipedia) or by journalists. Since Written Moroccan Arabic has no orthography, i.e. a generally accepted spelling standard, variation affecting a considerable number of forms is one its conspicuous features.
The aim of the present study is to discuss certain graphic phenomena related to writing Moroccan Arabic in Arabic script manifesting themselves in three text genres: readers’ comments (on a major Moroccan news platform), articles in the Moroccan Wikipedia, and journalistic texts (in a popular online newspaper). To this purpose, a theoretical and methodological apparatus is proposed which includes, beside other notions, the concept of variation, understood as a relations between graphic words (variants) which have the same meaning and pronunciation but different graphies. Three basic types of variation are distinguished: (i) qualitative (the difference between the variants consists in each of them containing a different graph – or different graphs – in the same position), (ii) quantitative (the differentiating element is a graph present in one form and absent from the other), and (iii) linear (the differentiating element is a space).
The results of the study show that the graphy of texts written in Moroccan Arabic in the Internet differs in certain respects from that of printed literary texts, although some shared features can also be indentified. The analysis also reveals that the three genres under examination differ from each other in terms of the occurrence of certain graphic phenomena, even though sometimes the differences are more a matter of frequency than clear-cut division. Finally, the levels of stability, or regularity, of particular genres vary, sometimes contrary to initial expectations.
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