The Meaning of a Multilingual Public Space: Linguistic Landscape in Tetouan (Northwest Morocco)
- Autores: Ángeles Vicente Sánchez, María Ballarín Rosell
- Localización: The handbook of multilingualism, identity, and language endangerment in Africa / coord. por Alireza Korangy, Evgeniya Gutova, 2025, ISBN 9789819647293, págs. 393-422
- Idioma: español
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Resumen
The sociolinguistic situation in Morocco is complex, with a diversity of languages interacting on a daily basis. Existing linguistic ideologies have created a hierarchical relationship between these languages that has been forged for political and socio-economic reasons.
This work is based on linguistic landscape studies and considers these spaces as communicative and interactive linguistic practices in a context of visible multilingualism. It focuses on the meaning of the use of different languages in the public spaces of the city of Tetouan (Northwest Morocco). Our main objective is to examine how the evolution of its sociolinguistic situation is represented in the urban commercial space in which several languages are used. For this we will describe which languages have been chosen in the commercial signs, how these languages are represented and the meaning of this choice.
Our data has been collected in the city of Tetouan, in northwest Morocco, in two of its main neighborhoods, the Medina and El Ensanche. They have been chosen because they are the commercial heart of the city and very different from each other: the oldest and most traditional, the first and the second, the result of Spanish colonization. In this particular linguistic context, we will compare how the linguistic landscape evolves depending on the peculiarities and the history of each one, reflecting hybrid practices and the hierarchy of existing languages in this Moroccan city.
