LSAAL 21: The Moroccan Arabic Substitution ġuş

 

Ibn Tofail University, Kénitra, Morocco

This book, which is the fifth of a series of works on Moroccan Arabic secret languages, proposes an extremely detailed account of the “ġuş”, a secret language of one region in the south-east of Morocco, the Tafilalet. The language in question contains a rich number of varieties. This work, which addresses linguistic areas of main concern to linguists, phonologists, morphologists, sociolinguists, dialectologists, arabicists, sociologists, graduate and post-graduate students, for instance, focuses on the secretising of a multitude of words, prepositions, verbs, phrases, clauses and sentences, for instance.

For descriptive convenience, this study proposes eight chapters and a detailed bibliography. The substitution “ġuş”, which is the main concern of this book and which involves thirty-two varieties, operates through the mere and single replacement of a consonant of the word by a given consonant of the variety of the family “x”. In this family of the secret languages no additional disguise item follows the encoded word. Thus, the word “kla” (eat), for instance, is encoded in one variety of the substitution “ġuş” as “sla” and as “wla” in another one. One extremely important aspect of the substitution secret language under study in this work is the crucial effect of the context of use of the language itself on the comprehension of the secret encounters, given the total absence of the disguise element, which would stand as the necessary key for the genuine deciphering of the encoded word.

ISBN 9783895861901. Moroccan Arabic Secret Languages 05. LINCOM Studies in Afroasiatic Linguistics 21. 182pp. 2008.