Levelling in progress: A case study of young people speaking Moroccan Arabic in Zaragoza, Spain

Children and young people with different varieties of Moroccan Arabic as their mother tongue and settled in the city of Zaragoza in north-eastern Spain participated in a sociolinguistic study that was carried out in 2011. The aim of the research was to analyse the linguistic practices of these young people and in particular to explore the linguistic levelling processes that may be taking place among these informants in a context where there is not only inter-dialectal contact but also contact with Spanish. Their speech was found to contain three features that point to levelling processes, one of them phonological - the realisation of the Arabic phoneme /q/ - and the other two morphological - the construction of broken plurals and the bare construction of the present tense.