Reacting to urbanisation in Morocco: New language practices, old discourses?

This chapter focuses on the town of Temara, Morocco, showing how the linguistic choices of younger male speakers have evolved with respect to those of the older generations of men residing in Temara, at least as far as two ongoing phenomena of language change are concerned. This appears to be the outcome of the youth’s effort to adapt to Temara’s increased social and regional diversification and, in parallel, to their improved material conditions of living, two aspects connected to the urbanization process and the huge demographic growth that the town has been witnessing in the last 50 years. However, a second analysis addressing the types of discourse that recur among the informants also shows how some of the young and old residents share the same arguments critical of the new ethic models that have emerged alongside this process. It thus emerges that moral schemes do not necessarily follow the same patterns as linguistic or social practices when they respond to global pushes towards (a certain type of) modernisation.