A month ago, I have chosen to publish our end term paper for the requirement of BA degree in English Studies, Linguistics major, on my blog, and here I publish it again so everyone can download and read the research, especially students.
The research is about the attitudes of Ibn Zohr University students towards Tamazight, and we tried to explore some of those attitudes through an online questionnaire, as well as how the Moroccan state manages the issue of Tamazight language after the independence.
I believe our research is well organized and structured, so that anyone can enjoy reading it. It is divided into 3 major sections:
- Literature review: this section is considered to be an introduction to the topic of our research, and in which we encountered some key points like the situation of Tamazight language in Morocco, policy of the state regarding Tamazight, and attitudes of general public according to previous studies.
- Methodology: this section examines the strategy we followed in our research in terms research design, data collection and the participants.
- Data analysis and discussion: in this section we discussed what we find regarding students attitudes, and how they vary according to native language and other criteria, and how this might affects the situation of Tamazight.
Although most of the respondents are speakers of one of Tamazight dialects (Tachelhit ⵜⴰⵛⵍⵃⵉⵜ, Tarifit ⵜⴰⵔⵉⴼⵉⵜ, Tamazight ⵜⴰⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⵜ), we also made some focus on qualitative data. For instance, we asked students who are Darija or Hassani natives to what extent they agree with the statement “The recognition and promotion of Tamazight would probably strengthen democratic values”, without interfering with the views of Tamazight speakers. However, we found that 53.38% strongly agree with the statement, 29.32% agree, and only 3.01% disagree.
I am sure many university students are going to benefit from this research in matter of structure, method, format, and analysis. However, I hope one day that somebody makes this type of sociolinguistic research concerning Tamazight on a bigger scale.
You can download this research in a pdf format here.