Judicial Practices and Language Ideologies in an Unofficially Multilingual Court
The courts have remained the Holy Grail for Amazigh activists in Morocco who seek institutionalized legitimacy for Tamazight (« Berber ») and an end to language discrimination and Arabic dominance in administrations. There is no official state policy for handling legal affairs in the indigenous Tamazight language ; Arabic instead dominates legal matters. Yet as I argue in this article, the « state » is comprised of individual civil servants, including judges and clerks, many of whom do use regional Tamazight varieties in the course of their work, including the task of registering customary marriages through mobile courthouses, which I examine here as the result of fieldwork and interviews. Judges’ language practices and ideologies merit our attention in any assessment of the political economy of language in Morocco, particularly given the high status and respect granted to these state representatives. Court personnel navigate political necessities according to local constraints and opportunities – including linguistic ones – and in so doing help shape the broader political economy of language in Morocco.