Le drame linguistique marocain by Fouad Laroui (review)

Reviews 289 first collects recent work employing online measures and covers such diverse topics as functional neuroimaging studies of Parkinson’s disease, event-related potential (ERP) investigations of syntactic and lexical processing, unconventional utterances among children with specific language impairment (SLI), and the use of emotional prosody by children with autism spectrum disorders. The second part of the issue deals with the use of offline measures (for example, judgment and production tasks) in psycholinguistic studies of French, and reports an investigation of the relationship between educational level and metaphor processing, a study on morphological inflection among Parkinson’s patients, and an assessment battery for language impairment in neurodegenerative diseases. The volume’s goal of strengthening connections between language-related disciplines is admirable, and it is consistent with the sentiment that greater interplay can lead to linguistic investigation that is better grounded in the biological foundations of language. While this is an area of linguistics and the language sciences where increased interdisciplinarity is needed (regardless of the language of investigation), this special issue does not consistently bring these fields closer to that goal. The articles on Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases are well constructed and report findings that seem justified given the design of their experiments; they focus, however, on research areas that remain of greater interest to clinicians and neurolinguists than to the more general population of applied linguists that is likely to encounter the volume. The articles reporting ERP and behavioral findings may be more accessible, and of greater interest, to applied linguists and psycholinguists. The review of findings from two decades’worth of imaging and lesion studies will serve as a useful, if dense, introduction to neurolinguistics for some novices, and the report on the assessment of language impairment functions equally well as a survey of communication disorders. The assessment battery presented in the latter article also has the potential to contribute to the clinical and research practices of the Francophone world. For a volume that targets applied linguists, however, “language and brain” is taken to encompass an overly broad range of topics: neuroanatomy; lexical-semantic and syntactic processing; language processing in bilinguals; and such diverse disorders as Parkinson’s disease, autism and SLI. Apart from linguists seeking a broad survey of current French-based work in these areas or specialists seeking out new work in one of these subfields, the volume will have little to offer as a coherent unit. That said, specialists in these fields are encouraged to seek out the individual articles. Northern Illinois University Robert V. Reichle Laroui, Fouad. Le drame linguistique marocain. Casablanca: Fennec, 2011. ISBN 978-9954-1-6736-6. Pp. 188. 80 DH. Cet essai richement documenté, qui s’inspire du concept de diglossie (Ferguson 1959), permet d’apprécier l’ampleur du drame linguistique marocain. En adoptant une approche sociolinguistique, l’auteur problématise le débat sur le statut des langues au Maroc: l’amazighe, l’arabe, le français et les autres langues étrangères. Le terme-clé que Laroui choisit pour qualifier la relation entre les Marocains et leurs langues est “confrontation”. Il écrit en effet que “les Marocains se trouvent confrontés, dès leur petite enfance, à plusieurs langues” (7). En menant une réflexion particulière, Laroui évite les discours simplistes sur l’identité, la culture et les langues au Maghreb. Grâce à sa connaissance des deux cultures marocaine et française, l’auteur établit des parallèles entre les débats linguistiques au Maghreb et en France.Après une discussion sur la relation entre la langue et le pouvoir, l’auteur analyse les difficultés de l’arabe littéraire. Ensuite il évoque les écrivains francophones tels que Ben Jelloun, Serhane et Nedali et leur relation aux langues en présence. Ce dernier a confronté cinq langues: l’amazigh en tant qu’enfant, l’arabe dialectal et l’arabe littéraire à l’école, puis le français, et finalement l’anglais. Enraciné dans la société, le multilinguisme fait partie du paysage culturel marocain. En plus du français et de l’amazigh, deux langues arabes coexistent au Maroc: l’arabe littéraire et le dialectal marocain (la darija). Bien qu’elle...