The "unnecessary" use of French in Moroccan Arabic: Social discriminant or collaborative enterprise?

The practice of code-switching between Moroccan Arabic and French is well documented among speakers of the former variety. Previous scientific stances on Moroccan Arabic-French code-switching (especially expressed in works almost entirely concerned with formal structure rather than sociopragmatic functions) merely saw bilinguals' recurring to French as an effort to upgrade their social status by using a "prestigious" language. Based on a sample of a corpus collected by the author, this contribution presents the first steps of a study which, by adopting an interactionalist approach, aims to identify the sociopragmatic functions that speakers fulfil through code-switching. The results show that, in communities where not all speakers are highly proficient, code-switching can also be used to fill the existing gaps between the speakers' linguistic repertoires. Such gaps are notably due to different levels of exposure to non-native French or being taught in private schools where French is the teaching language. It is also argued that, even in those cases in which code-switching is in fact due to the positive connotations of French, it is more fruitful to go beyond the "prestige versus stigmatization" dichotomy by looking at the indexical meanings associated with the forms employed. Examining the contexts of exposure to, learning, and use of these forms is suggested as a possible method to address such indexicalities.