Fatima Sadiqi is a native speaker of Amazigh (Berber). She wrote her MA thesis on the verb in Berber and her PhD on the complex sentence in Berber. In 1997 she used French to write the first grammar of the language by a native (published by L’Harmattan as Grammaire du Berbère). Her 2003 book Women, Gender and Language in Morocco (Brill Academic Publishers) is largely hailed as the first Language and Gender book in the MENA region. In 2014, she published Moroccan Feminist Discourses (Palgrave Macmillan) where she centers the Berber language and culture as the missing ingredient in the Moroccan accounts of feminist discourse.
TITLE AND ABSTRACT:
A Sociolinguistic Approach to the Amazingh (Berber) Language in Today’s Morocco
Amazigh is the oldest language in Morocco. Although it has been marginalized in modern Morocco, it has had a long and changing relationship with the other languages in the country: Standard Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, French, and Spanish. The power dynamics that have characterised this relationship partly created the field of sociolinguistics in Morocco. These dynamics gained center stage with the beginning of the 21st century and culminated in elevating Berber to the status of official language, an unprecedented event not only in the history of Morocco, but in the history of North Africa. These dynamics are interesting and can be grasped only within a sociolinguistic approach to the language and the culture it has vehicled for millennia.
Everbody is welcome to enjoy food and drinks at the mezzanine in the SVHUM building after the lecture.
Organized by Språk og samfunn, ISK