On March 27th, 2024, Abdelkrim Mouhib successfully defended his dissertation. His work, titled Understanding Superdiversity Through Linguistic Landscape in the City of Rabat, Morocco, presented multimodal data and his interpretations. By employing the Linguistic Landscape framework, he demonstrated how a relatively underrepresented area in the Global South has fostered a unique linguistic perspective of the city, which has underprivileged groups.
The dissertation committee was chaired by Christian Chun, with Jennifer Sclafani and Said Bennis as members.
Abstract: This dissertation investigated the sociolinguistic superdiversity in Rabat, the capital city of Morocco. Superdiversity is a completely different form of diversity that was never seen before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. For the past two decades, urban centers in the West have been experiencing an unprecedented influx of immigrants; as a result, these centers have become superdiverse and complex. Even though no study of superdiversity was conducted in Morocco before, I argue that this new form of superdiversity is already taking place in several urban cities including Rabat. The study, which follows the new trend of research that uses LL and ethnography as tools to investigate superdiversity in urban areas, took place in Fal Ould Oumeir, which is the busiest avenue in Agdal neighborhood and one of the richest areas of the city. Data collection was conducted during the summer semester of 2021 and the winter semester of 2022. On one hand, this study contributes to the field of LL studies which is relatively new even in Western sociolinguistics. On the other hand, it is the first study of its kind to be conducted in Morocco that will hopefully pave the way to more research in this underrepresented region. The data analysis reveals two major findings. First, it provides evidence that super-diversity is also a reality in urban areas of the Global South. Second, it shows how conviviality excludes Moroccans of limited income and sub-Saharan migrants as underprivileged groups existing in urban Rabat.
