Morocco’s history is made up of cross-fertilisation and long cohabitation between peoples of different origins, cultures and languages. This has resulted in a daily multilingualism and a pronounced taste for foreign languages.
Of course, the mother tongue of Moroccans, the official language of the country but also the language of the Islamic religion, is Arabic
However, it should be noted that the Arabic language used in Morocco is quite different from traditional or literary Arabic. Darija is spoken here, which is a simplified version of Arabic, a kind of “street Arabic”.
Then comes Amazigh, which is the language of the Berbers, whose land Morocco was originally.
Amazigh is spoken by nearly 40% of the population and now enjoys official recognition after having long been the object of a form of repression aimed at its disappearance and through it the particularities of the peoples who speak it. However, as the culture has resisted administrative dictates very well, Morocco has finally taken note of it. And it is now usual for official inscriptions or road signs to be expressed in Berber.
There remains the very particular case of French.
The country’s educated circles and the Moroccan bourgeoisie have almost made it their mother tongue. French is spoken in the wealthy families of Morocco as well as in Paris. But the practice of the language of Molière goes far beyond the privileged categories. It is due to the close and long-standing relationship between the two countries and their citizens, who have been used to living side by side, if not together, for over a century.
Thus, French is spoken everywhere, in all families, businesses and administrations. In the cities of Morocco, there is no place where a French person will be totally misunderstood. A French speaker can express himself and engage in dialogue in his language almost anywhere and with almost everyone, at least in urban areas.
A French person arriving in Morocco for the first time will be struck by the fact that all road signs, the press, the administration and a good part of the education system, as well as most of the literature, use French as their first and often only language. Although French is not an official language, it is far from being a foreign language. It is consubstantial with Morocco.
Spanish is spoken in the north of the country, in the regions close to Spain where the influence of the Iberian Peninsula remains important.
It is not uncommon to find, for example, that in the Tangiers region, Spanish is spoken more readily than French.
Finally, English benefits here as elsewhere from its status as the first international language of exchange.
English is taught in schools in Marrakech, as it is everywhere else in the world, and here too, children and adults spend a good deal of their time in front of Netflix, Facebook or Instagram…
More broadly speaking, it should be noted that Moroccans, born in a land of mixing, exchange and international tourism, show an astonishing ease in learning and practicing languages. Thus, tourists are always amazed that young teenagers have acquired the ability to express themselves in several languages and to hold a regular conversation in each of them…
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