Linguistic anthropology approaches to Arabic

In 2009, several Arabic Moroccan media venues began a campaign pushing back against a proposal to change the state administrative language from classical Arabic (known as الفصحى, eloquent Arabic) to Moroccan Arabic dialect, French, or Tamazight. ¹ The title of their campaign was ما تقيش لغتي “Don’t touch my language.” This phrase, and its background on a red hand of Fatima, intertextually linked to a Moroccan anti-terrorism public awareness campaign that emerged after the 2003 Casablanca bombings, ما تقيش بلادي “Don’t touch my country.” The visual call to preserve classical Arabic as the administrative language of Morocco paradoxically seemed to rely on Moroccan Arabic and anti-terrorism.