Moroccan toponymy and onomastics in the light of the Berber and Arabic sociolinguistic interaction

Abstract

This paper deals with toponymic and onomastic nouns and with some culturally specific socio-economic terms. Headlines of an adequate multidisciplinary method to deal with such categories of terms are given, with a special emphasis on linguistic and paralinguistic factors: substratic Berber nominal morphology, Berber phonetic changes and phonology, and linguistic and orthographic systems of adstratic implied languages (Arabic, European languages). The advocated method allows recognizing one same referent behind different phonetic or orthographic forms at use in historiographic and/or geographic or even journalistic records for that category of terms. The paper is rich in relevant concrete examples drawn especially from Moroccan toponymy and onomastics.