The first published vocabulary of Moroccan Arabic : A “re-edition” of Germain Moüette’s 1683 Dictionaire François-Arabesque

The present paper is a “re-edition” of the earliest known vocabulary of Moroccan Arabic to be formally published, a pioneering work that constitutes the final chapter of Frenchman Germain Moüette’s 1683 account of his captivity in Morocco. Captured by Barbary corsairs and sold into slavery in 1670, Moüette spent almost eleven years in several Moroccan towns, which allowed him to interact with fluent speakers of the colloquial language and eventually learn it himself. Moüette’s Dictionaire François-Arabesque is a highly valuable source for the history of North African Arabic because it provides us with first-hand data from the Arabic varieties spoken in late seventeenth-century Morocco. In our paper, we have attempted to identify each of the 854 expressions in Moüette’s Dictionaire François-Arabesque, provide them a more accurate transcription and English translation, and note associated linguistic features with implications for the historical study of Moroccan dialects.