The Jebli speech between the media and the city: exploring linguistic stereotypes on a rural accent in Northern Morocco

Abstract The symbolic values that speakers attribute to certain linguistic features constitute an important sociolinguistic topic which, barring a few seminal works, has not drawn much attention from scholars working on Maghrebi Arabic, and more specifically, Moroccan varieties. The present paper aims to deepen our understanding of metalinguistic representations of Jebli, a sedentary rural variety of Moroccan Arabic, within the speech communities of Larache and Ouezzane, two urban centres lying on the southern periphery of the Jbala region of Northern Morocco. We first analysed several samples of performed speech taken from an online Moroccan comedy sketch series entitled Jebli & Beldi, which includes a character epitomizing the Jebli accent, in order to identify those salient linguistic features that are perceived as being typically Jebli. As these phonetic and morphosyntactic traits are consciously selected in performed speech, it may be assumed that they make up a linguistic stereotype. We then asked a group of informants in the cities of Larache and Ouezzane to describe what they regarded as the typical features of Jebli speech and also their attitudes towards these features. The results of our study show that the features informants named partly coincided with our own sketch-based selection, and their attitudes towards these features were generally negative. These features did not appear in the speech of most informants, suggesting either their absence in their dialect or a deliberate avoidance strategy on their part. A small number in fact used these features but denied doing so, suggesting that the features are socially stigmatized. We argue that the symbolic values ascribed to some typical Jebli features may trigger their avoidance, which in turn may generate linguistic variation and even lead to linguistic change.