The first published vocabulary of Moroccan Arabic : A “re-edition” of Germain Moüette’s 1683 Dictionaire François-Arabesque

Authors

  • Jairo Guerrero Aix-Marseille University
  • Mike Turner University of North Carolina
  • Montserrat Benítez Fernández Spanish National Research Council
  • Araceli González Vázquez Spanish National Research Council

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13135/1825-263X/11461

Abstract

The present paper is a “re-edition” of the earliest known vocabulary of Moroccan Arabic to be formally published, a pioneering work that constitutes the final chapter of Frenchman Germain Moüette’s 1683 account of his captivity in Morocco. Captured by Barbary corsairs and sold into slavery in 1670, Moüette spent almost eleven years in several Moroccan towns, which allowed him to interact with fluent speakers of the colloquial language and eventually learn it himself. Moüette’s Dictionaire François-Arabesque is a highly valuable source for the history of North African Arabic because it provides us with first-hand data from the Arabic varieties spoken in late seventeenth-century Morocco. In our paper, we have attempted to identify each of the 854 expressions in Moüette’s Dictionaire François-Arabesque, provide them a more accurate transcription and English translation, and note associated linguistic features with implications for the historical study of Moroccan dialects.

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Author Biographies

Jairo Guerrero, Aix-Marseille University

Jairo Guerrero holds the position of Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Language and Culture at Aix-Marseille University. His research interests encompass Arabic linguistics and dialectology, Historical linguistics and Phonetics. His published research also explores phonetic variation in Maghrebi varieties and the presence of Arabic dialectal features in historical sources.

Jairo can be contacted at: jairo.guerrero-parrado@univ-amu.fr

Mike Turner, University of North Carolina

Mike Turner is Assistant Professor of Arabic at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. His research focuses on variation in Arabic nominal morphosyntax and the history of North African varieties.

Mike can be contacted at: turnerml@uncw.edu

Montserrat Benítez Fernández, Spanish National Research Council

Montserrat Benítez Fernández is a Tenured Scientist at Escuela de Estudios Árabes, CSIC (School of Arabic Studies, Spanish National Research Council). Her research focuses on Arabic Sociolinguistics, particularly on Moroccan Arabic varieties from a synchronic perspective. 

Montserrat can be contacted at: montsebenitez@eea.csic.es

Araceli González Vázquez, Spanish National Research Council

Araceli González Vázquez is a Tenured Scientist at the Institución Milà i Fontanals of the CSIC, a research centre based in Barcelona. She is member of the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, and belongs to the research group “Emergent Diversities in Islam, in Africa and Europe” (DIVERSE). She has previously worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (CSIC), at the University of the Basque Country and the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale of the Collège de France. Her main research interests include the anthropological study of Islam, Sufism, Gender and Human-Nonhuman relations.

Araceli can be contacted at: araceli.gonzalez@imf.csic.es

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Published

2025-01-20

Issue

Vol. 28 No. 2 (2024): Kervan 28/2

Section

Articles

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