LINGUISTIC PERFORMANCES IN THE DIALECT OF MOHAMMEDIA: ANALYSIS OF PHONOLOGICAL ASPECTS

Although the state of the art of dialectological and sociolinguistic research concerning Moroccan dialect is nowadays satisfactory when compared to other areas of Northern Africa, the varieties of some regions still lack a comprehensive description and have never been analyzed from a structural point of view. Consequently, the aim of the present paper is to take a closer look at the variety spoken in one of those areas: Mohammedia. One of the possible reasons that lie behind this variety being not much studied may be its proximity, both dialectologically and geographically, to other mainstream cities, that have been the object of historical and linguistic studies for a long time. Thus, with the awareness that exposure to new socio-economic environments and the expansion of social networks are often responsible for language variation2, this research aims at providing a description of the Arabic spoken in Mohammedia, and the way this latter is phonologically evolving, through the adoption of a cross-generational point of view. To this end, fieldwork was conducted in the city in August 2022, and data were collected through audio recordings involving informants, all women, who may represent three different age stages: early, middle and later adulthood, with the oldest informant aged 78 years old, and the youngest one 21. In this way, I will try to identify some obsolete as well as new emerging traits of the dialect in question, besides making more general considerations about it.