1

Multilingualism and linguistic planning in Morocco; the case of Berber and

Moroccan Arabic
By Mohamed Elmedlaoui

Stockholm University
Centre for Research on Bilingualism
(Oct. 18 2016)

Introduction

1- Morocco has always been a multilingual society (ref. in fn.2).

2- Among the current languages at use, Berber (in its different regional varieties through their
diachronic evolution,1) is the oldest language, historically reported.

3- Along the Moroccan and North African history in general, different other languages that
prevailed once in the Mediterranean area (Phoenician, Punic, Greek, Latin, Aramaic,
Classical Arabic, Spanish, French, English, etc.) were, successively or concurrently,
assigned different functions (formal education, religious instruction, learned literature, etc.)
with different sociolinguistic statuses in these countries.2

I. Berber

4- Through their long history, Berber varieties in North Africa remain for a long time
principally ORAL (i.e. restricted to everyday’s communication but with a rich popular oral
literature: poetry, tales, epics, etc.) with an extremely limited written traces, recorded in the
old Berber script known as “Lybique” (mostly, repestral inscription).3

5- With Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Omotic and Semitic language groups, the Berber group is
typologically classified by comparatists among the large Afro-Asiatic (or Hamito-Semitic)
language family.4 In Morocco, three main varieties of Berber were singled out as
Moroccan Berber dialects within the colonial ethnographic tradition, which considers first
the ethno-political influence of human groups at the time and only latter their respective
linguistic peculiarities. Those main dialects are Tarifit in the North, Tamazight in the
middle and Tashlhiyt in the South, but other particular isoglosses do constitute in fact other

1
Elmedlaoui, Mohamed (2012) “Berber”. pp. 131-198 in Lutz Edzard, ed. Semitic and Afroasiaric:
Chalanges and Opportunities. Porta Linguarum Orientalium. Neue Serie. Herausgegeben von
Worner Diem und Lutz Edzar. Band 24. Harrassowitz Verlag. Wiesbaden. 2012.
2
Elmedlaoui, Mohamed (2006)-c. "Le Berbère et l'histoire du plurilinguisme au Maghreb (le cas du
Maroc". Etudes et documents berbères (Paris. Novembre 2006). N° 23 (2005). Pp 153-178.
3
Galland, Lionel (2002) Études de linguistique berbère. Klincksieck, Collection « Linguistique ».
Louvain-La-Neuve/Paris.
4
Elmedlaoui, Mohamed (2011) "Le groupe berbère". Pp. 243-260 in Emilio Bonvini, Joëlle Busuttil
et Alain Peyraube (sous la direction de), Dictionnaire des langues. Quadrige / Presse
Universitaire de France.
 2

sufficiently distinct ones (the Figuig Berber dialect, for example). The differences between
all theses varieties are mainly phonetic (see point-7 bellow), with very few lexically different
items, but in addition to some morpho-syntactic peculiarities (clitics, conjunctions,
prepositions, and verbal systems). Inter-comprehension may thus be completely impossible
between speakers from geographically remote varieties. People speaking more phonetically
shifted dialects (Tarifit for example) are predisposed to learn less hardly the more
conservative dialects (Tashlhiyt for example) and vice versa.

6- From the 11th century up to the mid 20th century, a mainly religious Tashlhiyt Berber
literature, written in an Arabic Script and called “Al-Mazghi”, flourished in Southern
Morocco in particular.5 It gave rise, in that period, to a two-speed system of education in
those areas:
(i) One system in Classical Arabic, intended for formal education (CA grammar
and literature, Islamic sciences and medieval lay sciences) and
(ii) Another in Al-Mazghi, for informal religious adults’ education (trough
memorizing and reciting).6

7- With the rise of the Amazigh (i.e. Berber) Cultural (and ‘identitarian’) Movement in the
seventies of the 20th century (a movement which got strengthening by the nineties, in
parallel with the weakening of the Arabism and the rise of Islamism), the Royal Institute
for the Amazigh Culture (IRCAM) was created at 2001 in Morocco, and Berber started
being taught from 2003 on in some Moroccan public elementary schools. It is put, this
time, into writing in the Tifinagh script, a script derived recently from the old Lybique one.
The Berber corpus taught in those schools (handbooks, dictionaries) is being produced in
the Tifinagh-Ircam script by the IRCAM’s centres and labs since 2003. The corpus in
progress is intended to constitute a Standard Berber (“Amazigh Standard” = “ ‫األمازيغية‬
‫)”المعيارية‬, a trans-dialectal morpho-syntactic and lexical mixture in progress that abstracts
out some major regional historical phonetic changes (*k→š, *g→ž; *l→ř; *ll→ddž;
*lt→ttš; *r→a; etc.; see ref. in fn.-1) and makes use of a great amount of laboratorial
coined neologism. With this move, only newly taught children are expected to fully
understand, in principle, the so-called Standard Amazigh (the seven days of the week, for
example, completely newly coined because of a systematic attitude of avoiding/rejecting
any loan word from any other language, especially from Arabic, let have it been of use for
many centuries ago). Furthermore, children in those schools learn reading writing three
languages in parallel (Classical Arabic, French and Standard Amazigh) and in three
different scripts (Arabic, Latin and Tifinagh).

5
Boogert, van den, Nico (1997): The Berber Literary Tradition of the Sous; with an edition and
translation of 'the Ocean of Tears' by Mohammad Awzal. Publication of the "De Goeje Fund"
XXVII. Leyde: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten.
6
.‫) رفع الحجاب عن مغمور الثقافة واآلداب؛ مع صياغة لعروضي األمازيغية والملحون‬2012( ‫ محمد‬،‫المدالوي‬
.‫ الرباط‬-‫منشورات المعهد الجامعي للبحث العلمي‬
 3

II. Arabic and Moroccan Arabic

8- From the beginning of Islamic era, Classical Arabic (CA) became gradually the language
of formal education, religious, legal and learned literature’s written texts. In parallel, a
spoken variant of Arabic emerged along that period and spread gradually and continuously
until it ends up nowadays as the most SHARED spoken language among Moroccans. It is
spoken, or at least understood enough, even in those areas traditionally
speaking/understanding only Berber. That is Moroccan Arabic (MA).

9- With the same basic lexical fund as that of CA (in addition to some Berber substratic
loans), MA, which resulted from of long and gradual collective sociolinguistic process of
adopting Arabic by successive Berber speaking generations (in addition to some immigrant
population from Arabia, relatively very limited in umber), departs finally from CA as to its
own phonological, morphological and syntactic systems. These systems are basically of
Berber substrata.7 MA developed, in fact, new phonemes (amphatic /z/ and /r/ for ex.),
reduced the corresponding short vowels of CA to ‘Ø’ or schwa and turned corresponding
glides /y/ and /w/ and /Aleph/ into a new generation of vowels with no quantitative
opposition. On the syntactic level, the reduction of those old Semitic vowels resulted in a
disappearance of grammatical case marking, and this language became basically a Verb-
Subject-Object ordering language, with no case marking similar to the 3-case marking for
both nouns and verbs that characterizes CA.

III. Moroccan Arabic, as a Moroccan lingua franca koine.

10- Thanks to the modern demographic mobility and merge of population in urban centres, as
well as to the use of MA in radio TV and oral public discourse for many decades, this
language achieved its complete sociolinguistic homogeneity, as a shared lingua franca
koine, gradually from the beginning of the 2nd half of the 20th century. Its ACTUAL use
more and more by learned people in different spheres of the social oral communication
enriches it continuously with CA-based lexical items in their ‘moroccanized’ pronunciation
and enables it to express new intellectual and/or scientific concepts. The use of MA makes
that very elite itself at the same time, freer in borrowing and incorporating new technical
terms in its discourse from foreign languages (especially French and English), in
comparison with the use of CA, a language subject to a heavy tradition of conservatism
due to its relation to the religious founding texts of Islam and to the Arab nationalism
ideology. On this pragmatic level, it is MA that competes in fact directly and actually on
the ground with CA. Foreign languages (see point-13) competes with it (i.e. with CA) only
on the official linguistic policy and the ideological values levels. This sociolinguistic
competition on the ground between an official written conservative language (CA) and a
colloquial lively one of the same family (MA) takes practically, at the same time, the form

7
Elmedlaoui, M. (2000) "L'Arabe Marocain: un lexique sémitique inséré sur un fond grammatical
berbère"; pp: 155-187 in Salem Chaker, éd. Etudes Berbères et Chamito-Sémitiques; mélanges
offerts à Karl-G. Prasse; réunis par Salem Chaker et Andrjez Zaborski. Peeters: Paris-Louvain
2000.
 4

of a complement and mutual enrichment, liable of giving rise, through the lively evolution
of MA, to a bridging Middle Arabic form in the future.

11- However, despite its present days function as the ACTUAL MAIN shared language of
intercommunication in different spheres of collective social life in Morocco and among the
Moroccan Diaspora abroad, and aside a relatively large body of manuscript written in
Arabic script (collections of the rich Zjal and Malhun poetry tradition), MA remains of
only ORAL use, with no OVERT and OFFICIAL recognition within the formal
educational system, except, recently, from some private foundations of informal education
that are now experimenting teaching people (kids and adults) in their mother tongs. Even
these experiments remain however with no serious basis of scientific knowledge about MA
phonology, morphology syntax and APPROPRIATE orthographic system that does not
simply project the already defective orthography in se of CA items on their MA cognates.8

12- With the acknowledgement these last years by everybody of the failure of the educational
system as a whole, due in large part, and among other factors, to a language policy with no
scientific-based planning, an intense public debate erupted in 2013 on the issue of
introducing MA in the public school. Limited, at first, to the space of media (TV,
newspapers and the Net), this debate extended also to the very official institution “Conseil
Supérieur de l’Education, de l’Enseignement et de la Recherche Scientifique”. It remains
however, in both spheres, a purely ideological controversy about IDENTITY,9 with neither
relevant questions nor concrete results.

IV. Nowadays foreign languages

13- In the colonial period (France in the middle and Spain in North and South), the modern
Moroccan school introduced two other languages into the modern formal education, in
addition to CA. Those are French and Spanish, according to regions. While French ends
up, by the Independence of Morocco in the mid fifties of the 20th century, by supplanting
Spanish in its previous areas in North and South, competing thus finally alone only with
CA in school and university through the successive official linguistic ‘reforms’ of the
educational system, another language, English, made its entrance into sociolinguistic
competition by the last eighties with the two languages (CA and French) as a real language
of science, educational success and social ascension.

8
See (in Fr.): http://orbinah.blog4ever.com/en-francais-les-lecteurs-de-l-arabe-ne-sont-pas-tous-des-cancres

9
For a survey about this debate, two short texts in French:
(i) http://orbinah.blog4ever.com/en-francais-le-plaidoyer-d-a-laroui-contre-l-arabe-marocain-revigore-la-pensee-
pre-moderne-au-maroc

(ii) http://orbinah.blog4ever.com/en-francais-3-la-langue-de-l-enseignement-pour-une-circonscription-concrete-
du-probleme
 5

V. Conclusion

The above sketched extremely complex sociolinguistic situation gave, and still gives rise, to a
continuous eager intellectual and political controversy, in parallel to a series of successive
bureaucratic and contradictory educational ‘reforms’ in Morocco since the end of the French
Protectorate in the mid fifties. This controversy remains however largely ideological and
Identity-based, lacking pragmatic dimensions as well as relevant scientific approaches. As
such, it gives rise to quite schizophrenic attitudes: most of the proponents of CA or Berber in
their political and intellectual discourse on language policy of public education prefer actually
and practically private educational institutions that teach in French and/or in English or both,
in order to ensure a successful education for their offspring.

Mohamed Elmedlaoui
Mohammed V University in Rabat
Institut Universitaire de la Recherche Scientifique
Multilingual personnal blog: http://orbinah.blog4ever.com/articles