Moroccan Arabic

Moroccan Arabic, known locally as Darija, is the vernacular form of Arabic spoken across Morocco, distinct from the Modern Standard Arabic used in formal and official settings. It is native to Morocco and to the Spanish city of Ceuta, and functions both as a first language for most Moroccans and as a second language for other ethnic groups in the country. As of 2020 it had about 31 million first language speakers and 9.6 million second language speakers, some 40 million in total, with 91.9 percent of the population of Morocco speaking it and 80.6 percent naming it their native tongue. It belongs to the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family, forming part of the broader Maghrebi Arabic dialect continuum, and it shares a fair degree of mutual intelligibility with Algerian Arabic and, to a lesser extent, with Tunisian Arabic. Its many regional forms draw heavily on Berber, Latin, French, and Spanish influence in vocabulary and pronunciation, though the metropolitan speech of cities such as Casablanca and Fez dominates its media presence.