The Limits of Academic Discourse on the Vernacular of Moroccan Arabic

Abstract

A review of the various Moroccan academic approaches to understanding the Vernacular of Moroccan Arabic, that is Moroccan spoken Arabic, is provided in this paper. El Hanchi attempts to elucidate the foundations on which an academic understanding of Moroccan Spoken Arabic is built, in a bid to understand efforts which seek to replace Modern Standard Arabic with Moroccan Spoken Arabic across official channels throughout the country. To this end, the author examines the dominating Euro-American attitudes to language in Morocco, to better understand how Western scholars theorized Moroccan Spoken Arabic. Rhetoric in the Euro-American academe sets off from the supposition that there is an irreconcilable chasm between Modern Standard and Moroccan Spoken varieties of Arabic, demanding also that Moroccan dialect replace Modern Standard Arabic in official correspondence. Western academics, presenting ostensibly scholarly defenses for the promotion of Moroccan Spoken Arabic are joined by a less luminary, diatribe-based approach which is promoted by their lesser counterparts outside of the academe.