The work of ideology: examining class, language use, and attitudes among Moroccan university students

Abstract

This article investigates overt language attitudes and linguistic practices among French-taught university students in Morocco, showing the relationship between language behavior and attitudes. The results reveal a class-based divide in respondents' patterns of language use, in their support of the French monolingual sanitized classroom, and in their attitudinal dispositions toward the dominance of French as the language of instruction. Within the classroom, the hegemonic role of French is reinforced in student–teacher interactions through the exclusive use of French as the de facto code for ‘modern’ knowledge, whereas the local languages Moroccan Arabic, Standard Arabic, and Berber are portrayed as inadequate within the educational context. This divide between local and Western languages is a work of the institutionalization of French colonial ideologies, which continue to establish the use of Western languages as representing the engines of modernity. This is shown uniformly in the responses of all three classes in favoring the exclusive use of French and English as languages of instruction for science and technology. Thus, language politics within post-modern Moroccan schools continue to marginalize the political economy of local codes in their role in defining Moroccan society.