Diglossia and the ideology of language. The use of the vernacular in a work by Youssef Fadel (original) (raw)

This paper looks at the use of the standard and the vernacular in the Moroccan novel Qiṣṣat ḥadīqat al-ḥayawān (The Zoo Story) by Youssef Fadel. It demonstrates that the writer uses the vernacular as an ideological stance, and to comment on political predicaments, domestic and global. I argue that the use of the two varieties are used along ideological lines, not as each other’s opposite, but to put each other into relief, and that they are competing for hegemony rather than being in a static relationship.