qāmūs ad-dāriğa al-maġribiyya : réaction médiatique et pratiques linguistiques dans la presse numérique marocaine

The Zakoura Center for Promotion of Darija published in 2017 the first monolingual dictionary of Darija, a project developed by a team of Moroccan linguists and professors. According to the report of FAFO survey (Kebede, Kindt 2016), Darija is the most used variety in writing, especially on the internet, in Morocco. For this reason, this dictionary aims at the normalization and standardization of the spelling of this language, which is characterized by a rich diatopic and diastratic variation, especially at the phonetic, morphological, and lexical levels (Caubet 1993, Youssi 1992). From an ideological point of view, this publication has revived controversies between conservatives of Arabic Fuṣḥā and promoters of Darija. Therefore, this study aims to analyse the reception of this dictionary through the debate that took place on the internet, and especially through the analysis of a corpus of articles and readers’ comments of two Moroccan digital newspapers, Goud and Hespress. The purpose of this study is twofold: on the one hand, it wants to observe the opinion of readers in relation to the aforementioned dictionary, and more generally, on their relationship with their languages; on the other hand, it wants to investigate what language(s) or styles Moroccans use when they speak/write about language issues. The analysis of the comments shows contrasting results with respect to the linguistic choice of people against the promotion of the dictionary and the use of Darija in writing. At the same time, the linguistic analysis of the corpus shows that, at the morphological and syntactic level, mixed varieties of Arabic emerge among the usual practices of a so-called standard language, revealing a stylistic variation among the practices of both journalists and readers.