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Language policy debate and the discursive construction of Tamazight in Moroccan news media: a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis

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Abstract

Morocco is a multilingual nation where language policy debates have been going on since independence. In recent years, the Tamazight language (TM) has been the subject of one of the most contentious debates in this country. To understand the dynamics of this debate, the present study scrutinises the discursive construction of the TM in news media discourse. Specifically, it maps the language ideologies (LIs) circulated in meta-linguistic discourse(s) about TM and shows how they are discursively constructed and disseminated in news media. The paper argues that LIs effectively shape and orient language policy debates. Benefiting from the methodological synergy that the combination of corpus linguistics (CL) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) offers, the study analyses a corpus of 658 newspaper articles (803.444 tokens). Statistical measures such as absolute and relative frequency, collocates analysis and concordance analysis are the major CL tools used for the quantitative analysis of the data. On the other hand, the study uses CDA analytic tools developed within CDA variety Discourse-Historical Analysis (DHA), namely discursive strategies, the analysis of argumentation schemes and topoi. The analysis revealed that discourses of historicity, homogeneity, modernity, ‘scientificity’ and victimhood are some of the major discourses disseminated in the ideological debate about the situation of Tamazight in Morocco. The study offers some methodological implications for the marriage between CL and CDA.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Notes

  1. General Population and Habitat Census, 2014.

  2. Tamazight is used as a generic name for the three main Berber varieties one of which is also called Tamazight. All references in this paper but this one is to Tamazight (TM) as a hypernym.

  3. Agadir Charter for Linguistic and Cultural Rights,1991.

  4. Royal speech made on August 20th to commemorate the 41st anniversary of the Revolution of the King and the People, 1994.

  5. The asterisk is a search setting that indicates zero or more characters.

  6. The Amazigh Movement is a constellation of several associations and individuals whose aim is to better the situation of Amazigh people in Morocco.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the librarians and ICT technicians in the FLHS-Mohammedia for their help.

Funding

This study did not receive any specific financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Language, Literature and Translation, Faculty of Humanities, Hassan II University, Hassan II Avenue, P.O. Box 546, Mohammedia, Morocco

    Laanani Khalid

  2. Department of English, Faculty of Humanities, Hassan II University, Mohammedia, Morocco

    Fathi Said

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  1. Laanani Khalid
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  2. Fathi Said
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Contributions

We hereby state that both authors invested equal efforts in writing this paper. For the first main author, he collected the data and built the corpus and he also took up the task of writing the first draft under the continuing guidance of the second author. Both authors contributed equally to the analysis, discussion of the results and conclusions.

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Correspondence to Laanani Khalid.

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Khalid, L., Said, F. Language policy debate and the discursive construction of Tamazight in Moroccan news media: a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis. SN Soc Sci 3, 172 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-023-00725-4

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