Moroccan Arabic - Relationship With Other Languages

Relationship With Other Languages

Because people in the Middle East say that Moroccan Arabic is nearly unintelligible to them, some people think that this is because Moroccan Arabic is not a pure Arabic dialect. This conclusion is wrong. The real reason is that those people in the East don’t give much time to the Moroccan Dialect to be familiarized with it. Moroccan Arabic is grammatically simpler, and has a less voluminous vocabulary than Classical Arabic. It has also integrated many French and a few Spanish words. There is a relatively clear-cut division between Moroccan Arabic and Standard Arabic, and most uneducated Moroccans do not understand Modern Standard Arabic. Depending on cultural background and degree of literacy, those who do speak Modern Standard Arabic may prefer to use Arabic words instead of their French or Spanish borrowed counterparts, while upper and educated classes often adopt code-switching between French and Moroccan Arabic. As elsewhere in the world, how someone speaks and what words or language they use is often an indicator of their social class.