I am interested in morphological theory in general and its applications to Moroccan languages in particular. Most of my work has focused on the morphology of Amazigh. My interest extends to the morphology of Moroccan Arabic, too.
I have so far dealt with various aspects of the nominal and verbal morphology of Amazigh, such as action nouns, agentive nouns, bu-nouns, pluralization, the Construct State, morphological gemination, morphological haplology and the expression of negation.
Aspects of the morpho-phonology of Amazigh have also been central to my interests. Some of the areas I have covered are vowel augmentation, vowel copying, featural dissimilation and degemination.
I have always been fascinated by the phonology of Amazigh. One special aspect of my native language is its syllable structure, characterized by the possibility of having consonants as syllable nuclei and more interestingly words consisting of consonants only. Although my work has dealt with this aspect indirectly, as it interacts with the morphology, I have worked on the syllable and metrical structure of other Amazigh, as well as Moroccan Arabic, varieties. Vowel weight and the prosody of schwa are examples of the aspects I have dealt with.
Other phonological phenomena I have worked on include assimilation, dissimilation, vowel copying, compensatory lengthening and hiatus resolution.
Morocco is a typically multilingual context where a quite intricate mix of languages has resulted in a convoluted linguistic situation. A case in point is the contact between the native languages, Moroccan Amazigh and Moroccan Arabic, a contact that is compounded with the close genetic relationship between the two languages. The challenge when dealing with similar structures in the two languages resides in deciding whether the similarity is due to contact only or whether the similar structures are cognates. Areal factors may make the decision even more difficult.
Contact between languages results in very interesting phenomena from an applied sociolinguistics perspective. My work has focused on language policy/planning, language rights and language standardization.
As a teacher of English as a foreign language- the other part of my job description in addition to linguistics- I have been facing the challenge of integrating technology into teaching, more particularly with millenial students. My experience in the field started with the integration of digital materials. Later, I ventured into designing my own content, which is tailored to my students needs. I have presented my experience at different venues and published some of my ideas on the topic as well as some of the results of my experience, such as the Flipped Learning approach.