Linguistic borders between French and Arabic in the Family Code in Morocco: loanwords and identity issues

Abstract

Several observations have led us to investigate the loanwords used in the variety of French spoken in Morocco, in relation to an institutional document such as the Family Code i.e., the set of laws concerning the legal relations between the members of a Moroccan family. The text has evolved in a manner which is very favourable to linguistic interference, as it also manifests itself in the form of linguistic borrowings from the ‘dominant’ local languages, namely Standard Arabic and Moroccan dialectal Arabic. The presence of Arabisms constitutes a corpus that reflects these cultural and linguistic contaminations, generated within the framework of the state of bilingualism and the socio-cultural status determined by the use of the different languages spoken there. Therefore, our study will both investigate the lexical choices and the reasons for the presence of numerous Arabisms, concerning certain themes in the francophone text of the family code, and will connect them to the identity link, which unites the inhabitants of Morocco to Arab culture and to Muslim religion.