The Discursive Construction of Darija in Moroccan Online News Articles : A Diachronic Corpus-Based Approach

In keeping with a diachronic corpus-assisted discourse approach, this study explores the way Darija, a colloquial Arabic variety in Morocco, has been discursively constructed in online news articles over a ten-year timespan. To this end, a specialized corpus of over one million words was compiled from the news website Hespress . The study integrates the analysis of collocational frequencies and contextual examination of concordances, interrogating the links of the discourses encircling Darija with major sociopolitical events. Notwithstanding the local deep-seated linguistic rivalries and the prevailing standard language ideology, the findings suggest that Darija during this period adopts a joint discourse of resistance with Amazighiya (Berber) against the Arabophone ideology, arguing for a consolidated constituency of Moroccanness, fundamental to the maintenance and (re)production of the country’s cultural identity. Such findings shed light on language as a site of struggle, in which issues of social and institutional inequities are negotiated between contested ideologies