Introduction

Regional diversity of the Arabic language is usually understood as differences between local variants of countries or regions. Hence the interest in regionalisms arises on the ground of dialectology. However, despite the fact that Standard Arabic is generally considered to be a variant common to the Arab World, a certain degree of territorial differentiation can also be identified in this case. This differentiation is particularly visible in the lexical layer. Janusz Danecki writes:

Zeinab Ibrahim identifies the causes of lexical variation both in intra-linguistic factors, such as the nature of the language itself, and external conditions – geographical, social, situational, as well as in the activities of language academies and the influence of the media. In her dictionary entry in the Encyclopaedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics, Ibrahim cites examples of such variation, referring, among other things, to the peculiarities of the Moroccan area.

Compared to older studies, such as “Searching for Modern Fuṣḥa: Real- life Formal Arabic” by Dilworth B. Parkinson, the analyses carried out by Ahmed Abdelali, the results of which were published in the article “Localization in Modern Standard Arabic,” also seem methodologically interesting. Their aim was to examine the actual language used in communication addressed to broad strata of society. The source material excerpted from national newspapers has been used to investigate the lexical characteristics of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) of ten different countries where Arabic is spoken. A specialized spider program was applied as a data mining tool, which kept track of websites on an ongoing basis.

Objective of the study

This article does not attempt to index the regional variants of the vocabulary of Modern Standard Arabic of the Moroccan area. Its aim is a pragmatic- linguistic reflection on the complex nature of regionalisms and the reasons for their appearance in the language.