Season 1 — What is Arabic(s) in digital media?
The first season of Media Speaking Arabic(s) introduces the podcast’s central theme: the presence of Arabic, Moroccan dārija, and mixed linguistic forms across digital media between Morocco and Europe.
Across its first three episodes, the season explores how online journalism, podcasts, and social media become spaces where different registers coexist, intersect, and acquire specific social meanings. Its aim is not only to show that language changes in digital media, but also to understand how it changes, why it changes, and what these choices do in terms of communication, identity, and belonging.
This opening season serves as an entry point into the SABIRANET project and its main research questions. In a public-facing but research-based way, the episodes address a number of key issues: what is meant by “mixed Arabic”; how digital environments reshape the relationship between writing and speech; and how circulation between Morocco and the European diaspora contributes to the formation of new linguistic and media practices.
Throughout the season, the podcast guides listeners through an initial exploration of the phenomenon, showing that media language is never a neutral container, but rather a social practice through which proximity, authority, connection, and recognition are constructed. In this sense, the season invites listeners to approach Arabic in digital media not as a uniform reality or as a set of neatly separated varieties, but as a dynamic space of interaction between repertoires, uses, and social positionings.
The three episodes follow a coherent progression. The first introduces the phenomenon of mixed Arabic in digital media; the second focuses on the relationship between writing and orality; the third broadens the perspective to the transnational dimension, looking at how language circulates between Morocco and Europe, and how media contribute to the making of diasporic spaces and glocal connections.
This first season therefore lays the groundwork for the podcast as a whole: it provides the conceptual tools needed for the following seasons and invites listeners to reflect on media language as a key to understanding contemporary societies across Morocco, diaspora, and the Mediterranean.
