Maghreb Arabic

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Maghreb Arabic is a cover term for the dialects of Arabic spoken in the Maghreb, including Western Sahara, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya. Speakers of Maghreb Arabic call their language Derija or Darija, which means "dialect." It is primarily used as a spoken language; written communication is primarily done in Modern Standard Arabic, along with news broadcasting. Derija is used for almost all spoken communication, as well as in TV dramas and on advertising boards in Morocco and Tunisia. Derija is characterized by many borrowings from the languages of the colonizers of North Africa, including France and Spain, as well as independent developments, some of which are most probably due to a Berber substratum. Maghrebi dialects all use n- as the first person singular prefix on verbs, distinguishing them from Middle Eastern dialects and Standard Arabic. They frequently borrow words from French (in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia), Spanish (in Morocco) and Italian (in Libya) and conjugate them accourding to the rules of Arabic. Since it is rarely written, there is no standard and it is free to change quickly and to pick up new vocabulary from neighboring languages. This is somewhat similar to what happened to Middle English after the Norman conquest.

For several centuries after the Islamic conquest, Arabic was spoken only in cities in the Maghreb. It was only hundreds of years later that it entered the countryside and nomadic areas at the expense of the Berber languages, but these languages coexist to this day.

[edit] See also

Varieties of Arabic
Koines:
Fully pre-Hilalian:
- Jebli Arabic
- Jijel Arabic
- Maltese language
- Siculo-Arabic (extinct)

Bedouin:
- Hassaniya Arabic
- Libyan Arabic
- Saharan Arabic

Pidgin:
- Lingua Franca

- Andalusi Arabic

sidi, a Maghreb title of respect for males (an equivalent of Sir in English).

[edit] Further reading

Singer, Hans-Rudolf (1980) “Das Westarabische oder Maghribinische” in Wolfdietrich Fischer and Otto Jastrow (eds.) Handbuch der arabischen Dialekte. Otto Harrassowitz: Wiesbaden. 249-76.