By Pauline Finn
Rabat – Bringing together scholars from Algeria, Bulgaria, Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, France, the USA, and Morocco, the two-day conference provided an opportunity for researchers to present their work and for attendees to explore and discuss topics ranging from postcolonialism and literature to language policy, language education, and linguistics.
The conference opened with welcoming remarks by Rachid Hilal, the Vice-President of CDU, representing the President, followed by Reddad Erguig, ALCS Deputy Director and coordinator of the conference. Erguig’s comments outlined the seven-year history of the conference and described the goals of the conference, namely to provide an overview of the state of the art regarding contact between languages and cultures and opportunities for scholarly exchange.
Each day opened with a keynote speech by a prominent Moroccan scholar. Wednesday’s keynote by Abdelkader Sabil of Hassan II University was entitled “Revisiting ‘Cultural Studies’ in the Age of Globalization.” Expressing his sentimentality to be back at CDU where he spent 30 years, Sabil outlined a deep concern with the field of Cultural Studies and its current state in Morocco.
He called for establishing departments of Cultural Studies as a discipline rather than an orphan course in English departments, stating that its realm should not be limited to anglophone culture but should include cultural studies in Arabic. He argued that the field has the potential to contribute to establishing a Moroccan national cultural policy by promoting local Moroccan culture and documenting Moroccan cultural history.
Directly addressing the theme of cultures and languages in contact, Karim Bensoukas of Mohammed V University gave a keynote address on Thursday, entitled “Issues and Perspectives in Amazigh-Arabic Language Contact: Aspects of Phonological and Morphological Borrowing.”
This fascinating lecture highlighted the influences of Amazigh and Moroccan Arabic on each other in terms of lexical, phonological, and structural borrowing, syllable stress, and morphology. He called for more historical Moroccan linguistics and more study specifically of Hassaniya.
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Describing the conference as a rigorous academic event, Abdelaziz Boudlal explained that, “from the outset, [the conference] took an international dimension, and we’re trying to preserve that international dimension.”
This diversity was demonstrated both in the backgrounds of participants and in the variety of papers presented. Doctoral student Zineb El Abboubi commented that the conference “allows us to socialize with people from academia from all over the world… It is a small melting pot inside a conference.”
Both participants and attendees appreciated the diversity of themes that touched on issues related to Arabization, translation and globalization, language policy and planning, language in popular culture and media, and Islamophobia.
Dr. Boutaina Cherkaoui explained that events such as this allow us “to meet with scholars and researchers, make new connections, network, and to get insight into fields related to our field of research.” She added that having two parallel sessions was frustrating because there were so many presentations she wanted to attend.
Sabil noted that while the theme of the 5th edition of the conference is the same as the previous four conferences, the “variety comes from contributors and participants… Every time we discover something new that was absent in previous versions… There is no repetition at all.” Echoing this sentiment, doctoral student Nour-Sadate Benhima stated that “the discussions are always new and contemporary.”
The only negative aspect, according to ALCS Director Mohammed Yeou, was that “we were unhappy because some of the [international] participants couldn’t make it… due to funding.”
All in all, Bensoukas echoed the feelings of many when he stated that the 5th international conference on “Cultures and Languages in Contact” has been “very well organized and successful. There has been a wealth of papers in terms of themes.” As a biennial conference, the next edition of “Cultures and Languages in Contact” presented by the ALCS laboratory will take place in 2020 at CDU.
