Shnu parlez-vous?

One of the qualifications required of Fulbright applicants is proficiency in the language(s) spoken in the country in which they’re requesting to study. For Morocco, the Fulbright website specifies that this means Arabic and French.

“So, uh, what are you doing here?”


A solid question, posed to me by some fellow grantees over a lunch at summer orientation when it emerged that, in fact, I could communicate in approximately zero of the two aforementioned languages. My response – “I speak Spanish…” – reveals that the Moroccan linguistic situation is much more complex than you might infer from the dual listing on the Fulbright site.

The official language of Morocco is Arabic. But here, right off the bat, we need to stop and clarify. The official language is something called Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), or fus-ha in Arabic. Closely resembling the Classical Arabic used in the Qur’an and medieval texts but adapted to modern times, MSA can be found mainly in formal settings media, government, education and the like. It takes more or less the same form across the Arabic-speaking world and is typically the Arabic that American students learn in the classroom.

However, no one really communicates in MSA. In daily life, I mean. Arabic-speakers who know it use it in the appropriate contexts, but it’s like a foreign language in that acquisition comes through schooling; rare the person who grew up babbling in MSA. Indeed, uneducated Moroccans might not know the language much at all, beyond what they pick up from watching the news or can decipher from their knowledge of colloquial Arabic.

The implication there is that colloquial Arabic, called darija in western Arab countries and amiyya in eastern ones, can be markedly different from MSA. I say “can be” because the degree of difference varies from country to country, darija to darija, amiyya to amiyya. All these types of Arabic share big-picture characteristics, of course, like the 28-letter right-to-left alphabet and basic grammatical structure, but vocabulary and pronunciation can deviate wildly from one to the other. Example: ma, shnu and eiy all mean “what” in MSA, Moroccan darija and Egyptian amiyya, respectively. Similarly, I remember watching an Iraqi film in Arabic class during my sophomore year of college and asking the Egyptian TA afterward how much of it she had understood. “About 40 percent.” Holler.

Apparently Moroccan colloquial is especially anomalous. Rod reports that when he was in Egypt and wanted to take advantage of Arab discounts at the movie theater – you know, working the brown skin thing – he would just tell the ticket seller that he was Moroccan. The guy would be so disinclined to slog through the weird darija that he’d wave Rod right through, no questions asked.

That being said, Moroccan darija might be the most fun language ever. Did I mention that the word for “what” is shnu? As Sam says, who doesn’t love a language that allows you to say shnu thirty times a day and actually mean something by it? Other gems: zween (“pretty,” “nice,” “great” – all-purpose expression of positive sentiments), kayn shee hefla? (“is there a party?”), and the mandatory from-your-gut pronunciations of hOOt and tsOOd (“fish” and “nine”).

So, then, as the CLEA (see sidebar) part of my grant comes to a close next week, a logical question may have arisen in your head: what is it that I’ve been studying these past five-and-a-half months?

After two years hiatus from the one year of Arabic I took as a college sophomore, the first five weeks here were a crash course in Moroccan colloquial. It was initially overwhelming to dive back into the language so intensively; then the script and grammar came rushing back and there were an exhilarating couple of weeks wherein my “learning” (half learning, half remembering) curve resembled the trajectory of a launched rocket. Sadly, what goes up must come down, or at least plateau (according to the law of plateauage, the lesser-known cousin of the law of gravity), and said learning curve has been no exception.

To compound this deceleration, I switched to MSA classes after the orientation period, meaning that I’ve been trying to speak one thing in the street and another in the classroom. Alhamdoulillah the teachers are patient.* Sanae, last semester, used to smile and wink and say “hadda darija, ya Caitlyn" (“that’s colloquial, Caitlyn”) whenever I slipped up.

People outside the classroom are even more forgiving of the mishing and mashing of MSA and colloquial. In all likelihood, they do it themselves, occasionally throwing in French and Spanish and the indigenous Berber languages for good measure. Moroccans are ridiculously multi-lingual. The last time I was here, for ten days in spring 2008, my friend Kelsey and I had an entire conversation with a Chefchaouni street craftsman wherein I spoke Spanish, she French and he ping-ponged back and forth between the two of us, shouting side-comments to his friends in Arabic.

Inspired by this linguistic hodgepodge, I decided that I should also tackle French (still the elite language of government, higher education, etc.) while living here. Great story.

The most accessible classes in French are offered by the Institut Francais – along with the Instituto Cervantes (Spanish) a lingering soft-colonial presence found in all of the major cities of Morocco. I wandered over to their Fes office to sign up in early October and was told that I would first need to take a placement exam before class started at the end of the month. Although fairly certain that I could place myself – hi, level 1, please – I showed up for the exam and managed to BS my way through it pretty well by drawing on my knowledge of Spanish and English and by referencing vocab from certain sections to help me out with others.

It turned out I did too good of a job BS-ing. They placed me in level 5. Level 5? The students – Moroccan, men and women, of various ages – could all express themselves in fluid, if simple, sentences, and they had already learned conjugations of the present tense, gerund and one of the past tenses. Over the course of the three-month class, we hit a second past tense, as well as the future. Check.

The funny thing was that I could follow everything that we were doing. I mean, French grammar is really no different than Spanish grammar. But I have no vocabulary or pronunciation skills. I can understand it; I just can’t produce it. Sheer awesomeness, therefore, when the teacher started having us carry out spontaneous role-plays of interactions like job interviews. I scraped by on what I hoped were passably Frenchified Spanish words, accompanied by a lot of exuberant hand gestures. Let’s just say that our (very wonderful) teacher had a perpetually puzzled expression on her face when it was my turn to speak. Especially when Arabic would come out of my mouth instead of French – a not infrequent phenomenon around hour five or six of the the day's class time when the only message my brain was able to fire was, "Not English! Give me anything but English!"

Despite being in waaaaay over my head, the class was a great experience. It got me out of the ALIF bubble and in with some Moroccans. Their class behavior and response to questions taught me more about Moroccan culture. I improved my listening and reading comprehension of French, even though I still can’t speak or pronounce a lick of it.

In short, the class sufficiently roused my inner Francophile that when I get settled up north, I’d like to take some more lessons – starting with the basics, this time. In’sha’allah, if God wills it, I will find a way to continue with Arabic as well.

Until then, however, the happiest email I’ve received lately was from my Fulbright friend, Eric, who lives in Tetouan, my future home up north and the capital of the former Spanish protectorate: “… In terms of housing, I can give you the number for my landlord. He doesn’t speak any French, just Arabic and also Spanish.”

Spanish! Communication! Alhamdoulillah!


* Note on teachers: I have been beyond, beyond impressed with the ones I’ve had at ALIF. They are kind, experienced, energetic and incredibly knowledgeable. Always take personal experiences with a grain of salt, but if you or someone you know are interested in studying Arabic in a foreign country, I would highly recommend the school.