Maghrebi Arabic

Maghrebi Arabic, or Maghrebi Darija, is the principal spoken language in the Maghreb region, including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. It includes Moroccan Arabic, Algerian Arabic, Tunisian Arabic and Libyan Arabic. It is sometimes referred to as Western Arabic (as opposed to the Eastern Arabic known as Mashriqi Arabic). Speakers of Maghrebi call their language Derja, Derija or Darija.

Modern Standard Arabic (الفصحى (al-)fushā) is the preferred language of governments, legislation and judiciary of countries in Maghreb. Therefore, Maghrebi Arabic is mainly a spoken and vernacular language, even though it occasionally appears in entertainment and advertising in urban areas of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. In Algeria, where it was taught as a separate subject under French colonization, some textbooks in the language exist, although they are no longer officially endorsed but the Algerian authorities. Maghrebi is established on a Berber^[2] and possibly a Punic^[3] substratum, influenced by the languages of the people who lived or administered the countries of the region, during the course of history, such as Latin, Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Italian, Spanish, and French.

The varieties of Maghrebi Arabic Darija have a significant degree of mutual intelligibility, specially between geographically adjacent ones (such as local dialects spoken in Eastern Morocco and Western Algeria or Eastern Algeria and North Tunisia or South Tunisia and Western Libya) but hardly between the Moroccan and Tunisian Darija. Conversely, the Moroccan Darija and particularly the Algerian Derja cannot be understood by Eastern Arabic speakers (from Egypt, Sudan, Levant, Iraq, and Arabian peninsula) in general as it does derive from different substratums and a mixture of many languages (Berber, Old Arabic, Turkish, French, Spanish, Italian, and sub-Saharan languages). Some linguists like Charles A. Ferguson, William Marçais and Abdou Elimam, tend to consider Maghrebi Arabic Darija as an independent language.^[4][5]

Maghrebi Arabic continues to evolve by integrating new French or English words, notably in technical fields, or by replacing old French and Italian/Spanish ones with Modern Standard Arabic words within some circles; more educated and upper-class people who code-switch between Maghrebi Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic have more French and Italian/Spanish loanwords, especially the latter came from the time of al-Andalus. Maghrebi dialects all use n- as the first-person singular prefix on verbs, distinguishing them from Levantine dialects and Modern Standard Arabic.

Speakers frequently borrow words from French (in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia), Spanish (in Morocco) and Italian (in Libya and Tunisia) and conjugate them according to the rules of Arabic with some exceptions (like passive voice for example). Since it is not always written, there is no standard and it is free to change quickly and to pick up new vocabulary from neighbouring languages. This is somewhat similar to what happened to Middle English after the Norman conquest.

Linguistically, Siculo-Arabic and therefore its descendant Maltese are considered Maghrebi Arabic closest to Tunisian Arabic, but it is no longer mutually intelligible with the varieties spoken today in North Africa.^[6] When discussing modern languages, the word is often given a geographic definition and limited to Northern Africa.

Varieties

An overview of the different varieties of Arabic. Maghrebi varieties are shades of blue.

• Varieties of Arabic
• Pre-Hilalian Arabic dialects
• Hilalian dialects
• Koinés:
  • Algerian Arabic
  • Moroccan Arabic
  • Tunisian Arabic
  • Libyan Arabic
  • Jebli Arabic
  • Jijel Arabic
  • Andalusian Arabic (extinct)
  • Siculo-Arabic (extinct)
    • Maltese language (descended from Sicilian Arabic, but influenced lexically by Tunisian, Libyan, Sicilian, Italian, French, and more recently, English)
• Western Bedouin:
  • Hassaniya Arabic
  • Saharan Arabic

Name

Darija, Derja or Delja (Arabic: الدارجة‎‎) means "everyday/colloquial language";^[7] it is also rendered as ed-dārija, derija or darja. It refers to any of the varieties of colloquial Maghrebi Arabic. Although it is also common in Algeria and Tunisia to refer to the Maghrebi Arabic varieties directly as languages, similarly it is also common in Egypt and Lebanon to refer to the Mashriqi Arabic varieties directly as languages. For instance, Algerian Arabic would be referred as Dzayri (Algerian) and Tunisian Arabic as Tounsi (Tunisian), and Egyptian Arabic would be referred as Masri (Egyptian) and Lebanese Arabic as Lubnani (Lebanese).

In contrast, the colloquial dialects of more eastern Arab countries, such as Egypt, Jordan and Sudan, are usually known as al-‘āmmīya (العامية), though Egyptians may also refer to their dialects as al-logha-d-darga.

References

1. ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016). "North African Arabic". Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. 
2. ↑ Tilmatine Mohand, « Substrat et convergences : Le berbère et l'arabe nord-africain », Estudios de dialectologia norteaafricana y andalusi, n°4, 1999, pp. 99-119
3. ↑ Benramdane, Farid (1998). "Le maghribi, langue trois fois millénaire de ELIMAM, Abdou (Éd. ANEP, Alger 1997)". Insaniyat (6): 129–130. Retrieved 12 February 2015. 
4. ↑ Abdou Elimam, « Le maghribi, langue trois fois millénaire », éd. ANEP, Alger (1997)
5. ↑ Abdou Elimam, « Le maghribi, alias ed-darija, langue consensuelle du Maghreb », éd. Dar El Gharb, Alger (2004)
6. ↑ Borg and Azzopardi-Alexander Maltese (1997:xiii) "The immediate source for the Arabic vernacular spoken in Malta was Muslim Sicily, but its ultimate origin appears to have been Tunisia".
7. ↑ Wehr, Hans: Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (2011); Harrell, Richard S.: Dictionary of Moroccan Arabic (1966)

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.