Two Phonologic Competitors in an Evolving Moroccan City

This paper suggests a new approach to a much-studied linguistic variable in Arabic dialectology, ie. the diachronic reflex of the etymological correspondent of the Old Arabic phoneme /q/, and does so in the socio-demographic context of the Moroccan town of Temara, situated next to Rabat. This is one of many urban centres that have witnessed a dramatic increase of their population in the last decades, due to huge immigration fluxes coming from all over Morocco. As emerges from data collected among the town’s residents, the alternation between two reflexes of Old Arabic /q/, /q/ and /g/, is quite complex as it involves variation not only among speakers, but also among and within lexemes. In order to identify the causes and social meanings related to such intricate phonologic alternation, a test was elaborated aimed at indirectly eliciting some of the concerned lexemes in the informants’ speech. An interactionalist analysis of the test results has then revealed unexpected dynamics underlying the informants’ choice between the two phonemes. In this paper, the focus will be on the role that information structure appeared to assume in such choice.