The urban and the urbane: Identities, language ideologies, and Arabic dialects in Morocco

Abstract The migration of old-urban elites to new-urban areas has been given scant attention in the sociolinguistics of mobility. This article examines language ideologies of differentiation that emerged from the migration of Morocco's bona fide old-urban elite from the city of Fez (the Fessis) to the new metropolis of Casablanca. This understudied sociolinguistic encounter brings into sharp focus two quintessential old-urban and new-urban varieties of Arabic along with their complex indexical system that links linguistic forms to identities, lifestyles, and moralities. Based on ethnography and discourse analysis of interviews with two women of Fessi extraction in Casablanca (a migrant and a local-born), I provide an in-depth account of what sounding Fessi means and accomplishes—and fails to accomplish—for these women, showing in the process the (re)production and change of language ideologies. The article demonstrates how changes in indexicalities relate to ongoing group boundary reconfiguration and to processes of linguistic (non)accommodation. (Arabic, North Africa, language ideologies, indexicality, gender, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics of mobility, historical prestige, social reallocation) *