Ethnic Stereotypes and Lexical Semantics: The Emergence of the Rural/Urban Opposition in Moroccan Arabic

Abstract

In Moroccan Arabic (MA), although there is a word meaning ‘urban’, there is no standard equivalent for ‘rural’ or ‘countryside’. Perhaps there was no communicative need for these concepts in the past, but speakers in the modern era have been drawing on lexical items referring to various ethnicities living in rural areas surrounding cities to communicate the concept of ‘rurality’. Thus, the Northern dialects use ‘ʒəbli’ (highlander), the North-Western dialects use ‘ʕrubi’ (Bedouin), while those spoken in the Middle Atlas Mountains use ‘ʃəlħ’ (Berber) all with the sense of ‘rural’. There may well be other items used in other regions, but the phenomenon has remained unexplored, both in Morocco and other Arab or African countries. In order to investigate the sociolinguistics of the rural/urban contrast, we distributed a questionnaire among the inhabitants of Fez. The choice of this city was made on the ground that its surrounding rural areas are inhabited by three ethnicities: the Arabic-speaking highlanders, the descendants of the Bedouin tribes that invaded North Africa in the eleventh century, and Berbers. We reasoned that since Fessi city-dwellers have been in contact with these ethnicities for centuries, they have developed stereotypes of each of them that might justify the selection of a term denoting one of them to carry the new meaning ‘rural’. The questionnaire consisted of 15 items inquiring about the most appropriate term to describe rural and urban members of the three groups, in addition to demographic questions about the respondents. 179 questionnaires were returned, and the data were submitted to the SPSS software for analysis. In order to account for the data, two semantic systems were postulated: an ethnic and a geographic system. According to the ethnic system, ‘ʒəbli’, ‘ʕrubi’, ‘ʃəlħ’, and ‘mdini’ (city-dweller) denote different ethnic groups, irrespective of whether these groups live in the country or in the city. By opposition, the geographic system, though keeping ‘ʒəbli’ and ‘ʃəlħ’ as ethnic terms, uses ‘ʕrubi’ in the sense of ‘rural’ and ‘mdini’ in the sense of ‘urban’. Thus, the Bedouin group was selected as the most representative of ‘rurality’. We postulated further that there is a gradual semantic change from the ethnic to the geographic system that is reflecting the social change from a tribal society to a class society. This change is controlled by a number of factors. A series of Chi-square tests indicate that age, level of education and whether or not a respondent has rural origins are among these factors, while sex turned out to have no significant effect. Social stereotypes were also found to accelerate or to hinder the change in the sense that some groups were perceived as more liable than others to adopt the urban way of life. In conclusion, although the topic has not been investigated, a comparison with other Arab and African societies will contribute to a better understanding of how social change bears on lexical semantic systems.