Words such as ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ tend to be taboo words (probably in order to prevent jinnees from interfering with the children). These often have expressive sound formations, such as the substitution or addition of a phoneme by ħ. Often such wordt have Arabic roots (e.g. in other Riffian dialects aħāmuš ‘boy’, which contains the Arabic root ħrm ‘be forbidden’, often used in conotations of bastard children. It is difficult to establish an Arabic basis for aħənžia; one could think of Moroccan Arabic xənzir ‘pig’ with the well-attested expressive sound substitutions of a back consonant by ħ and of z by ž. This is however far from certain.
