Arabic Dialect Contact and Change in Casablanca: The Role of Simplification and Salience in the Adoption of a Morphosyntactic Variable

Abstract:The sociolinguistic outcomes of migration in Morocco's largest city, Casablanca, are examined through analysis of the adoption of the second person gender-marking norms of Casablanca Arabic by three groups whose heritage varieties have a corresponding merger or distinction of gender. Ethnographic interviews and interactions with multigenerational families show that convergence to the dominant Casablanca norm is not uniform across the three different groups. While linguistic simplification is important, differences in referential and nonreferential indexical meanings of each group's linguistic variant vis-à-vis that of Casablanca play a critical role in the different outcomes of this morphosyntactic contact.