Media Speaking Arabic(s):
A New (G)local Digital Heritage
Rosa Pennisi
English Script
Season 1 – Which Arabic(s) in digital media?
Episode 1 title: When Media Speak Mixed Arabic
English script
Media Speaking Arabic(s) is the podcast of SABIRANET: a journey through the languages of digital media, exploring how Arabic, between Standard Arabic, Dārija, and mixed forms, tells stories of belonging, mobility, and connection between Morocco and Europe.
…
Welcome to Media Speaking Arabic(s): a new (g)local digital heritage, the podcast of the SABIRANET project.
SABIRANET is funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU through Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan, Young Researcher 2024 – SoE line, administered by the Italian Ministry of University and Research.
In this podcast, we explore the relationship between Arabic language, digital media, mobility, and society across Morocco and Europe.
I am Rosa Pennisi, researcher in Arabic language and literature, and you are listening to the first episode of the first season.
…
There are moments, in teaching, when students’ reactions reveal much more than any definition can.
That happens to me, for example, when I bring Arabic journalistic texts into the classroom.
Students often expect to find a relatively uniform language: a newspaper language, more or less recognizable, more or less close to what they know as “Standard Arabic”.
Then we begin to read.
And at a certain point, something happens.
A word appears. Or an expression. Or a construction that no longer matches that initial idea of compact, uniform journalistic language.
Something sounds closer to speech. More ordinary. More local.
And very often, the reaction is one of surprise.
Not so much because the text suddenly becomes incomprehensible.
But because it stops matching an expectation.
Sometimes that surprise comes from a tiny detail: a particle, a demonstrative, a formula that seems to bring the rhythm of speech into the page. And precisely because the detail is small, the effect is even more interesting: it forces us to understand that the difference between a language perceived as “journalistic” and a language perceived as more proximate, more ordinary, more socially situated, does not always depend on major changes. Sometimes very little is enough to make a text sound as if it is speaking in a different way.
Students realize that the language of newspapers and media is not always and only the language they imagined.
That within that written space, other tones, other rhythms, and other social signals can enter.
And that is exactly where an interesting question arises.
Indeed, a question that concerns not only students of Arabic, but anyone interested in media, language, and society.
What happens when media do not speak in only one language?
What happens when, within an article, a podcast, or a social media post, Standard Arabic, Dārija—that is, Moroccan Arabic—and mixed forms become intertwined?
What do these choices produce?
What do they tell us about the public these contents address, the social world they evoke, and the forms of belonging and connection they make visible?
This is where the first season begins, under the title Which Arabic(s) in Digital Media?
It is a question that seems merely linguistic, but in fact it is also social, cultural, and media-related.
In this first episode, we begin with the basics, and with the following question: what happens when media speak mixed Arabic?
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Let us take a brief step back and add some context.
This podcast is part of SABIRANET, a research project devoted to the analysis of linguistic practices in digital media produced in Morocco and within the Moroccan diaspora in Europe, with particular attention to Italy, and also to countries such as France and Spain that face the Mediterranean.
The project examines several kinds of material: online newspaper articles, podcasts, social media content, and, more broadly, texts and media productions that allow us to observe language in use within digital public spaces.
Its goal, however, is not simply to describe linguistic forms.
It is not simply a matter of saying: this is Standard Arabic, this is Dārija, and this is an intermediate form. The question is broader.
The question is: what do these linguistic choices do in media discourse?
What kinds of relations do they construct?
What ideas of authority, proximity, authenticity, or correctness do they activate?
And how are they perceived by speakers, both in Morocco and in diasporic European contexts?
When I speak of “mixed Arabic” in this podcast, I use the expression descriptively, not normatively.[1]
Not to designate a separate and stable language, but to describe the co-presence, within the same text or communicative event, of different linguistic resources: forms close to Standard Arabic, forms closer to Moroccan Dārija, and intermediate elements which, taken together, produce a hybrid media style, both in writing and in speech.[2]
In digital media, mixed Arabic—and, more broadly, the presence of features that are not fully standard—should not be read as noise or deviation.
It is very often a meaningful practice: one that constructs proximity, authority, belonging, and mobility.
A practice that leaves traces of a cultural heritage, that now also passes through digital platforms.
For example, in SABIRANET data, mixed Arabic expressions are characterized by the co-presence of:
– forms associated both with Standard Arabic and Moroccan Dārija;
– intermediate elements;
– signs of orality within writing;
– lexical or syntactic choices that shift the tone of discourse;
– and oscillations that bring the text closer to a particular audience or social space.
Put differently: we are not dealing with a “defective” language, but with a language that reflects mixed styles capable of doing several things at once.
This is especially visible in digital media.
Because digital environments tend to redraw boundaries that, in other contexts, appear more rigid:
the boundary between writing and speech, between journalism and conversation, between formality and informality, between centre and periphery, between the local and the transnational.[3]
And this is exactly why the phenomenon becomes interesting from a sociolinguistic point of view.
Because the language of media is never merely a neutral tool.
It is a social practice.
It is a site where relations are built, positions are expressed, and forms of belonging are negotiated.[4]
And, in the case of a project like SABIRANET, it is also a way of observing how language circulates between Morocco and Europe, between national contexts and diasporic spaces, between media writing and collective memory.
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The first idea I would like to highlight is this: mixed Arabic in digital media should not be thought of simply as the product of a loss of control over language.[5]
It is not, automatically, a corrupted form.
It is not, in itself, a sign of incompetence.
And it is not necessarily a polemical move away from the norm.
Very often, it is a functional practice.
It serves to produce a particular effect.
It serves to build a specific relationship with the audience.
It serves to modulate distance between speaker and listener, or between writer and reader.
It serves to calibrate authority and proximity.
Think, for example, of an online article. A text may be written within a frame that evokes informative journalism, but still include—at specific points—words, formulas, or signals that localize it socially.
At that point, the text does not only transmit content.
It also makes a position audible.
It brings out a tone.
It produces proximity, emphasis, irony, complicity, or identity marking.
In podcasts this is even more evident. Because the voice makes these nuances immediately perceptible.
A voice can be informative without being distant.
Authoritative without being rigid.
Competent, yet still recognizable as close to a particular social or linguistic world.
And in social media, all this becomes even more intense.
Because social platforms are spaces where language does not simply transmit content: it stages forms of belonging, affinity, position-taking, and relations to an imagined or real community.
In other words: in digital media, language is not a container.
It is an active part of the communicative scene.
One of the most interesting features of digital media is that they make the distinction between writing and speech less rigid.
This does not mean that writing disappears.
And it does not mean that everything becomes spontaneous conversation.
It means, rather, that some written texts incorporate signals that bring them closer to voice, while some oral texts are constructed with a strong awareness of form and of public discourse.
In an online article, for example, a very small linguistic choice can be enough to shift the overall tone of a text.
A particle. A deictic. A colloquial expression.
A construction that evokes a particular repertoire.
A concrete example can be found in the opening of a title published in the Moroccan newspaper Goud, which reads: “واش هادي قناة ولا بلاتفورم؟”
That is: “Is this a TV channel or a platform?”
In this title, words such as واش (interrogative particle) and هادي (demonstrative) clearly signal a tone closer to Moroccan Dārija, while بلاتفورم introduces a loanword from a foreign language. The overall result is a headline that remains journalistic, yet builds its effect through a combination of different resources.
It is an interesting example because we are still within the space of a written headline, and yet the tone clearly evokes a language of greater proximity, closer to conversation than to a purely standard and impersonal register.[6]
What is striking, in cases like this, is not only the presence of a “non-standard” form.
It is the fact that such a form changes the communicative pact.
The text seems to say: I am informing, but I am also speaking from a particular place.
I am writing, but I am also making myself heard as a voice.
I am communicating, but I am also constructing a relationship with the reader.
And this is where the digital becomes crucial. Because, on digital platforms, texts do not live in isolation: they circulate, they are commented on, shared, reformulated, excerpted, and set in motion again.
Their language, then, is not only form: it is also an index of sociality.
This is why observing Arabic in digital media means observing a field where writing and orality are no longer two neatly separate poles, but two resources that combine in different ways.
From an analytical point of view, this mixing does not always appear in spectacular form.
Sometimes we are not dealing with texts that are “completely” in one variety or another.
Sometimes the difference plays out through very small details, yet ones that are sociolinguistically significant.
These may include:
– demonstratives;
– particles;
– negation structures;
– verbal forms;
– recurrent expressions;
– ways of organizing the utterance;
– signals that more clearly evoke Dārija, or that in any case move discourse away from full standard uniformity.
The point is not to memorize each of these categories.
The point is to understand the principle:
Linguistic mixing is not necessarily striking on the surface.
Sometimes a minimal element is enough to shift the tone of a text.
A text may seem, overall, close to a standard register, yet still include small signals that bring it closer to another mode of communication.
Or it may be strongly anchored in a more colloquial repertoire, while retaining traits that evoke formality, public information, or argumentative organization.
And it is precisely this coexistence that matters to research.
Because it shows that digital media are not only places where language “circulates”: they are also places where language negotiates itself.
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At this point it is important to introduce a second key idea, one that is central to SABIRANET: the language of digital media should not be observed only within the borders of Morocco.
It should also be observed in its circulation.
In its trajectories.
In its passages between national contexts and diasporic spaces.
Diasporic communities are not simply communities far from their country of origin.
They are complex social spaces where repertoires, communicative habits, linguistic memories, and media practices are continually transformed.
That is why, when we look at media of the Moroccan diaspora in Europe, we are not simply looking at an “external copy” of Morocco.
We are looking at places where language is rearticulated.
Places where the relation between Standard Arabic, Dārija, orality, writing, and other communicative resources is redefined in relation to new social experiences.
A concrete example comes from a Facebook page such as “Magharba Italia” (مغاربة إيطاليا), “Moroccans in Italy,” where the very name already combines two spaces of belonging.
In a post about Italy’s failure to qualify for the World Cup, the phrase “إيطاليا تبكي”, “Italy is crying,” appears in Arabic script.
And under that post a user writes: “Mi dispiace tantissimo per l’Italia, wallah, speravo tantissimo che vincesse.”
That is: “I am really very sorry for Italy, wallah, I really hoped they would win.”
This is a highly interesting example because, in a very short sentence, the Italian context, an emotional bond with Italy, and a linguistic resource such as wallah, which clearly evokes another repertoire, all coexist. In this sense, language is not only being used to comment on an event: it makes visible a plural form of belonging and a concrete connection between Morocco and Europe.[7]
In cases like this, language does not only express an opinion or react to an event.
It also maintains ties.
It builds a sense of continuity.
It makes visible a “we” that does not fully coincide either with the “here” or with the “there.”
A “we” that is built precisely through media, mobility, and connections between Morocco and Europe.
That is why, at the beginning, I spoke of belonging, mobility, and connections between Morocco and Europe. Because the linguistic practices we are concerned with are not static.
They are practices in motion.
They accompany lives that move, families that maintain long-distance relations, publics that recognize themselves through platforms, and content that travels from one context to another.
In this sense, the language of digital media is deeply diasporic and transnational.
Not only because it is used in diaspora, but because it participates in the construction of diasporic spaces.
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I would like to add here another idea, one that runs through the whole project and is also echoed in the subtitle of the podcast: A new (g)local digital heritage.
At first glance, this may seem like a very broad expression.
But it helps us grasp an important point.
When linguistic forms, ways of speaking, lexical choices, tones, and repertoires circulate in digital media, we are not only observing a momentary use of language.
We are also observing traces.
Traces of belonging, of memory, of social experience, of contact, of continuity and transformation.
A newspaper title, a recurring formula, a register choice in a podcast, a caption, a comment, a way of addressing a community: all of these can become part of a shared media memory.
Not heritage in a static or museum-like sense.
But heritage in the sense of a living, circulating, situated repertoire.
Something that belongs to a social present in motion, and that leaves observable traces precisely through the digital. And this heritage is, precisely, (g)local.
Local, because it is rooted in specific contexts, in precise linguistic histories, in recognizable experiences. But also, global—or rather transnational—because these forms travel, transform, and reorganize themselves between Morocco and Europe.
For this reason, listening to the language of digital media does not simply mean analysing forms. It also means asking what these forms preserve, transmit, and make shareable.[8]
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At this point, I would like to suggest a small exercise in listening.
Or perhaps, more precisely, in attention.
When we come across a text in Arabic produced in a digital environment, we can ask at least three very simple questions.
The first is: what kind of text is it?
An article? A podcast? A post? A comment?
Because, to paraphrase a famous formula by Marshall McLuhan, the medium is part of the message: the medium is never neutral, never just a container, but contributes to the construction of meaning.[9]
The second question is: what kind of relationship does it build with its audience?
Does it want to inform from a distance? To seem close? To persuade? To appear authoritative, ironic, familiar, militant?
And finally, the third question is: which linguistic choices produce these effects?
To understand better how these three questions work, we can look at three very different cases.
To clarify the first case, let us return to the headline from the Moroccan online newspaper Goud:
“واش هادي قناة ولا بلاتفورم؟”
That is: ‘Is this a TV channel or a platform?’
Here the medium is the journalistic headline, that is, a written and public space.
But the relationship that the text builds is not one of purely distant and impersonal writing: its tone evokes a language of proximity, more immediate, closer to conversation.
And this effect passes through highly specific linguistic choices, which make visible how journalistic writing can incorporate elements closer to Dārija—such as the interrogative واش and the demonstrative هادي —and to a less rigidly standard register, including the word بلاتفورم in borrowed form.
The second case—that is, the medium, the language, and the relationship with the audience—comes from the diasporic Facebook page “Magharba Italia”, “Moroccans in Italy,” which we have already mentioned.
In the post on Italy’s failure to qualify for the World Cup, we said that the phrase “إيطاليا تبكي”, “Italy is crying,” appears.
And under that post a user comments: “Mi dispiace tantissimo per l’Italia, wallah, speravo tantissimo che vincesse.”
Here the medium is the social network, that is, a space of reaction, circulation, and comment.
The relationship built with the audience is immediate, participatory, emotional.
And here again the linguistic choices matter: in a very short sentence, Italian, emotional involvement with Italy, and a resource such as “wallah”, which clearly evokes another repertoire, coexist.
Language here does not merely describe a form of belonging: it stages it.
The third case again comes from Facebook, but it opens onto a different issue, and therefore requires a brief note of context.
In 2025, in Morocco, there was intense public debate around ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā, the Feast of Sacrifice, one of the most important religious moments in the Islamic calendar, during which families traditionally perform the sacrifice of a ram and celebrate with ritual and family gatherings. In that year, it was officially announced that the sacrifice should not be carried out in individual households, but that the ritual would be assumed in public form by the sovereign.
And this opened many questions even outside Morocco, especially in diasporic contexts.
It is in this context that a Moroccan user residing in Spain publishes the following direct question on Facebook:
“هل الجالية المغربية المقيمة بأروبا واش من حقهم يعيدو أم لا؟؟”
That is: ‘Does the Moroccan community living in Europe have the right to celebrate [Eid] or not??’
This sentence in the post is written in Arabic script: the first part—“the Moroccan community residing in Europe”—aligns, at least orthographically, with Standard Arabic; the second part, by contrast, displays features typical of Moroccan Dārija, including the interrogative form and the verbal morphology.[10]
Here too the medium matters: this is not a closed text, but a post that introduces a video in which an imam interprets the message of the religious authorities and, at the same time, generates comments, replies, and debates in Arabic, Moroccan Dārija, and foreign languages such as French and Spanish.
The relationship with the audience is explicit: the post directly addresses the diaspora as a public and as a collective subject.
And language, once again, does not merely formulate a question.
It serves to construct a “we”, to make visible a dispersed yet connected community, and to place it within a discussion that concerns authority, belonging, and everyday life between Morocco and Europe.
These three cases show that the language of digital media should always be read as a situated social practice.
It is not enough to ask: is this word standard or non-standard?
The more interesting question is another one: what is this word doing here?
Why does it appear here, precisely?
What kind of relationship does it build?
What kind of public does it imagine?
What idea of language does it make possible?
And this is precisely the perspective that will guide the next episodes of the podcast.
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So, returning to the opening question of this first episode: what happens when media speak mixed Arabic?
First of all, language becomes visible—or rather, audible.
It does not remain in the background as a simple vehicle of content, but emerges as an integral part of communication.
It also means that the relationship between writing and speech is redefined.
Writing incorporates voice.
Voice takes on forms of public discourse.
And digital media become places where different registers coexist, intersect, and acquire specific social meanings.
Then language also speaks to us about mobility.
About connections.
About lives moving between Morocco and Europe.
About diasporic spaces that also exist through platforms.
About communities that recognize, imagine, and maintain themselves through linguistic choices that may appear small, but are socially dense.
And finally, these linguistic practices compel us to reconsider the language of media not as a simple frame, but as a key for understanding contemporary societies.
A key for understanding how authority and proximity are built.
How belonging is negotiated.
How memories and shared repertoires sediment in digital space.
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In this first episode, we have laid the foundations.
We have begun to define what we mean by mixed Arabic in digital media, why the digital makes the intertwining of writing and orality so important, and why circulation between Morocco and the European diaspora is an essential part of the phenomenon.
In the next episode we will look more closely at one of these dimensions: the relationship between writing and voice.
We will see how digital media redraw the boundary between orality and writing, and why this matters so much when we speak of language, audiences, and mediated presence.
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You have been listening to Media Speaking Arabic(s), the podcast of the SABIRANET project. SABIRANET is funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU through Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan, Young Researcher 2024 – SoE line, administered by the Italian Ministry of University and Research.
In the description you will find the link to the project website, where you can listen to and read all episodes, transcribed and enriched with explanatory notes and bibliographical references.
I am Rosa Pennisi, and thank you for listening.
See you in the next episode.
Notes
[1] Mixed Arabic / mixed styles.
Gunvor Mejdell is a leading scholar of Arabic sociolinguistic variation and written language change. Her book Mixed Styles in Spoken Arabic in Egypt: Somewhere between Order and Chaos is important because it treats mixed Arabic not as random “mixing” or corruption, but as patterned discourse shaped by genre, situation, and interactional goals. That perspective is useful here because the term “mixed Arabic” is being used descriptively, to account for co-present resources rather than to label an autonomous language variety.
[2] Diglossia, continuum, and Arabic variation.
The classic point of departure is Charles A. Ferguson’s 1959 article on diglossia, which described Arabic as a situation characterized by a functional distribution between a “High” and a “Low” variety. Later work enriched this picture. In Epilogue: Diglossia Revisited (1996), Ferguson himself reflected on the limits of a rigid binary model. El-Said Badawi’s Mustawayāt al-ʿArabiyya al-muʿāṣira fī Miṣr (1973) was especially influential in proposing multiple levels of contemporary Arabic rather than only two sharply separated varieties. More recent scholarship has further emphasized that diglossia is not only a structural description but also an ideology that shapes what speakers think counts as “correct,” “proper,” or “serious” language. See especially Kristen Brustad’s chapter “Diglossia as Ideology”.
[3] Digital media and shifting boundaries.
For a strong theoretical discussion of how media environments reshape linguistic practices and blur older boundaries between media language and conversational language, see Jannis Androutsopoulos, “Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change: Key Concepts, Research Traditions, Open Issues” (2014). In Arabic contexts, this question is central to the volume The Politics of Written Language in the Arab World: Writing Change (Høigilt and Mejdell, eds., 2017), which analyses changing norms, practices, and ideologies of written Arabic in Egypt and Morocco.
[4] Language as social practice in Arab digital publics.
For contemporary Arabic writing as a site of ideology, stance, and social positioning, see Jacob Høigilt and Gunvor Mejdell (eds.), The Politics of Written Language in the Arab World: Writing Change (2017). Two particularly relevant chapters are Kristen Brustad’s “Diglossia as Ideology” and Emad Abdel Latif’s “The Oralization of Writing: Argumentation, Profanity and Literacy in Cyberspace.” For Moroccan digital discourse in particular, see Atiqa Hachimi’s chapter “Moralizing Stances: Discursive Play and Ideologies of Language and Gender in Moroccan Digital Discourse”.
[5] Moroccan Dārija as vernacular, and writing without a single shared standard.
Moroccan Dārija is the main vehicular vernacular of everyday oral communication in Morocco, but it does not have a single standardized and universally shared written norm comparable to that of Standard Arabic. This does not mean that it is “unwritable”; rather, it means that its writing practices are historically variable, socially contested, and still evolving. On the recent growth of written Dārija, especially in public and digital spaces, see Catherine Miller, “Contemporary dārija Writings in Morocco: Ideology and Practices” and Dominique Caubet, “Morocco: An Informal Passage to Literacy in dārija (Moroccan Arabic)”, both in Høigilt and Mejdell (eds.), 2017.
[6] Goud example.
For the Goud article cited in this episode, see:
https://www.goud.ma/واش-هادي-قناة-ولا-بلاتفورم؟-تساؤل-انتا-720405
[7] Magharba Italia / World Cup post.
For the Facebook video-post discussed in this episode, see:
https://www.facebook.com/magrebini/videos/1561739413849192
[8] Glocal digital heritage, media traces, and digital memory.
The term “glocal” is classically associated with Roland Robertson’s work on globalization, especially Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (1992), where he argues that local and global processes are not opposites but mutually constitutive. For the idea that digital media preserve circulating traces, memories, and socially meaningful fragments, see Andrew Hoskins (ed.), Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition (2018). While this episode uses “heritage” in a deliberately broad and non-museal sense, these perspectives help explain why recurring forms, formulas, and media fragments can matter as shared cultural traces.
[9] McLuhan.
The reference is to Marshall McLuhan’s famous formulation “the medium is the message,” most closely associated with Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). In this episode the phrase is used freely and heuristically: the point is not to restate McLuhan in a strict sense, but to underline that medium shapes meaning rather than merely carrying it.
[10] Spain / ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā post.
For the Facebook post discussed in this episode, see:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1386587382349045
References
Latif, E. A. (2017). The oralization of writing: Argumentation, profanity and literacy in cyberspace. In The politics of written language in the Arab world (pp. 290-307). Brill.
Androutsopoulos, J. (2014). Mediatization and sociolinguistic change. Key concepts, research traditions, open. Mediatization and sociolinguistic change, 36, 3.
Badawi, A. S. M. (1973). Mustawayāt al-ʿArabiyya al-muʿāṣira fī Miṣr: baḥth fī ʿalāqat al-lugha bi-l-ḥaḍāra. Dār al-Maʿārif.
Brustad, K. (2017). Diglossia as ideology. In The politics of written language in the Arab world (pp. 41-67). Brill.
Caubet, D. (2017). Morocco: An informal passage to literacy in dārija (Moroccan Arabic). In The politics of written language in the Arab world (pp. 116-141). Brill.
Ferguson, C. A. (1959). Diglossia. word, 15(2), 325-340.
Ferguson, C. A. (1996). Epilogue: Diglossia Revisited. In Understanding Arabic: Essays in Contemporary Arabic Linguistics in Honor of El-Said Badawi (pp. 49–68). The American University in Cairo Press.
Hachimi, A. (2017). Moralizing Stances Discursive Play and Ideologies of Language and Gender in Moroccan Digital Discourse. In The politics of written language in the Arab world (pp. 239-265). Brill.
Høigilt, Jacob, Gunvor Mejdell, eds. 2017. The Politics of Written Language in the Arab World: Writing Change. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Hoskins, A. (Ed.). (2018). Digital memory studies: Media pasts in transition. New York: Routledge.
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Mejdell, G. (2017). Mixed styles in spoken Arabic in Egypt: Somewhere between order and chaos (Vol. 48). Brill.
Miller, C. (2017). Contemporary dārija writings in Morocco: Ideology and practices. In The politics of written language in the Arab world (pp. 90-115). Brill.
