147 © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 A.E. Ebongue, E. Hurst (eds.), Sociolinguistics in African Contexts, Multilingual Education 20, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49611-5_9 Ethnic Stereotypes and Lexical Semantics: The Emergence of the Rural/Urban Opposition in Moroccan Arabic Ahmed Ech-charf and Lamyae Azzouzi Abstract In Moroccan Arabic (MA), although there is a word meaning ‘urban’, there is no standard equivalent for ‘rural’ or ‘countryside’. Perhaps there was no communicative need for these concepts in the past, but speakers in the modern era have been drawing on lexical items referring to various ethnicities living in rural areas surrounding cities to communicate the concept of ‘rurality’. Thus, the Northern dialects use ‘ʒəbli’ (highlander), the North-Western dialects use ‘ʕrubi’ (Bedouin), while those spoken in the Middle Atlas Mountains use ‘ʃəlħ’ (Berber) all with the sense of ‘rural’. There may well be other items used in other regions, but the phe- nomenon has remained unexplored, both in Morocco and other Arab or African countries. In order to investigate the sociolinguistics of the rural/urban contrast, we distrib- uted a questionnaire among the inhabitants of Fez. The choice of this city was made on the ground that its surrounding rural areas are inhabited by three ethnicities: the Arabic-speaking highlanders, the descendants of the Bedouin tribes that invaded North Africa in the eleventh century, and Berbers. We reasoned that since Fessi city- dwellers have been in contact with these ethnicities for centuries, they have devel- oped stereotypes of each of them that might justify the selection of a term denoting one of them to carry the new meaning ‘rural’. The questionnaire consisted of 15 items inquiring about the most appropriate term to describe rural and urban mem- bers of the three groups, in addition to demographic questions about the respon- We would like to thank the following people for having read and commented on an earlier version of this paper: Badia Zerhouni, Catherine Miller, Kristen Brustad and Thomas Leddy-Cecere. We would also like to thank Ellen Hurst (the editor of this volume) for suggesting to us the connection between the topic of this paper and language ideology; the third section was added as a response to this suggestion. All shortcomings remain ours, though. A. Ech-charf (*) Depatment of Languages, Mohamed V University, Rabat, Morocco e-mail: charf1968@gmail.com; a.echcharf@um5s.net.ma L. Azzouzi Depatment of English, Moulay Ismail University, Meknes, Morocco e-mail: azzouzilamiae@gmail.com charfi1968@gmail.com