Language Variety Choice in Moroccan TV Advertising:: a Sociolinguistic Study

The present study is a sociolinguistic analysis of language variety choice in Moroccan television advertising discourse. To find out whether language variety choice is random as some admen claim or whether it is rule-governed, we relate admen's choices to sociolinguistic norms generally governing language variety choice in the Moroccan multilingual speech community. The general hypothesis is that the use of the language varieties as governed by the context of advertising would coincide with the diglossic function of these varieties in the speech community. As data, we examine a sample consisting basically of ads recorded over two weeks from the Moroccan national television channel, TVM. Language variety distribution in these ads is examined according to five variables, deemed significant to language choice: the circumstances of broadcast, the medium (written/spoken), the social domain of use of the product, the nature of participation and the persuasive genre.