“In the Middle East, it’s cool to ‘Sing Moroccan’”: ideologies of slang and contested meanings of Arabic popular music on social media

Abstract

Abstract Against the background of the marginalization of North African in relation to Middle Eastern Arabic vernaculars, this paper considers the ways in which popular music has propelled the commodification of Moroccan Arabic and made it a site of deep contestation. It centers on a controversial love song written and performed in Moroccan Arabic by Middle Eastern musicians, specifically their use of sātˁa, a derogatory youth slang term for “girl.” Drawing on in-depth stance-taking analysis of Moroccans’ digital metapragmatic discourse, it argues that metapragmatic debates position some Moroccan musical genres as authentic and some speakers and places as illegitimate representatives of the nation, thus enregistering certain ways of speaking with deviant social types and musical genres. This study has broader implications for the resignification of historically marginalized linguistic varieties in a more globally connected world, including the tensions this creates between the commodification of language and local constructions of sociocultural authenticity and legitimacy.