The attributive possessive in Moroccan Arabic spoken by young bilinguals in the Netherlands and their peers in Morocco

Abstract

Moroccan Arabic has two competing syntactic constructions for possessive marking: a synthetic one and an analytic one. The distribution of these constructions is investigated in semi-spontaneous narratives (frog stories) from four Moroccan cities and from the diaspora community in the Netherlands. This distribution is found to depend very much on the individual lexical items that head the construction, and on the form of the dependent, pronominal dependents favouring the synthetic form. Regional variation in Morocco is linked to the sociolinguistic history of the regions. The northern town of Tangier, where language contact with Berber (and Late Latin) had the greatest impact on the formation of Arabic dialects, shows the greatest preference for the analytic genitive. The immigrant community in the Netherlands shows an increased preference for the analytic form in comparison with their peers in Morocco. This concerns possessives with NP dependents in particular, which suggests a direct influence of Dutch as the socially dominant language.