Mohammed V University, Morocco
Vol.8 No.2 (Serial No.13) 2020 _Contents
121-150
2020-12-30
The complexity of the Moroccan language landscape sparks off a power struggle between languages. The focus in this chapter is on the apparent French/English language contest over supremacy. Here comes the current investigation that aims at gauging Moroccan’s perceptions of French and English through a language questionnaire. Responses were subjected to statistical analyses to support or reject the hypothesis that gender, age and language proficiency affect Moroccans’ evaluations of French and English. The study reveals that Moroccans’ attitudes towards English are significantly more favorable than those towards the French language. Age, but not gender, has turned out to have a statistically significant difference in the overall evaluation of French and English. These evaluations have also been shown to correlate with the respondents’ French and English language proficiency. The result of this study is an indication that Moroccans’ attitudes toward French and English are undergoing a change from a conventional preference for French to a recent favor of English whose phenomenal growth globally may have affected language attitudes locally.
language attitudes, tendency, evaluation, solidarity, status
doi: 10.26478/ja2020.8.13.8
Appel, R. & P. Muysken. 1987. Language Contact and Bilingualism [M]. London: Edward Arnold.
Baker, C. 1992. Attitudes and Language [M]. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Bentahila, A. 1983. Language Attitudes among Arabic-French Bilinguals in Morocco [M]. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Chaplin, T. & A. Aldao. 2012. Gender Differences in Emotion Expression in Children: A meta-analytic review [J]. Psychological Bulletin, 139(4):735-765.
Eagly, A. H. & S. Chaiken. 1998. Attitude Structure and Function [A]. In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske & G. Lindzey (eds.). The Handbook of Social Psychology [C]. New
York: McGraw-Hill, 269-322.
Easton, D. & J. Dennis. 1969. Children in the Political System: Origins of political legitimacy [M]. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Gardner, R. C. 1985. Social Psychology and Second Language Learning: The role of attitudes and motivation [M]. London: Edward Arnold.
Glenn, N. D. 1974. Aging and Conservatism [J]. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 415:176-186.
Grandguillaume, G. 1983. Arabisation et Politique Linguistique au Maghreb [M]. Paris: Maisoneuve et Larose.
Hess, R. D. & J. V. Torney. 1967. The Development of Political Attitudes in Children [M]. Chicago: Aldine.
Likert, R. 1932. A Technique for the Measurement of Attitudes [J]. Archives of Psychology, 140:5-55.
Marley, D. 2004. Language Attitudes in Morocco Following Recent Changes in Language Policy [J]. Language Policy, 3(1):25-46.
Mouhssine, O. 1995. Ambivalence du Discourse sur L’arabisation [J]. International Journal of Sociology of Language, 112:45-62.
Ryan, E. B., H. Giles & R. J. Sebastian. 1982. An Integrative Perspective for the Study of Attitudes towards Language Variation [A]. In E. B. Ryan & H. Giles (eds.)
Attitudes towards Language Variation: Social and applied contexts [C]. London: Edward Arnold, 1-19.
Sadiqi, F. 1991. The Spread of English in Morocco [J]. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 87(1):99-114.
Sears, D. O. 1981. Life-Stage Effects on Attitude Change, Especially Among the Elderly [A]. In S. B. Kiesler, J. N. Morgan & V. K. Oppenheimer (eds.). Aging:
Social change [C]. New York: Academic Press, 183-204.
Wester, S., D. L. Vogel, P. K. Pressly & M. Heesacker. 2002. Sex Differences in Emotion: A critical review of the literature and implications for counseling
psychology [J]. The Counseling Psychologist, 30(4):630-652.