A Language of Morocco

A Language Problem Case Study of MoroccoExpanding on yesterday's question of why illiteracy remains a pertinent problem in Morocco, I created this case study that examines Morocco's language problem.
Let's take a look at the linguistic barriers facing two hypothetical children growing up in Morocco. The first one, we'll call Simo. He's from an Arabic speaking part of Morocco and represents the 56% of Morocco's urban population. The second one is Ito. She's from the High Atlas Mountains and speaks Tamazight, one of the Amazigh dialects. She represents Morocco's rural population.
Toddlers

• Simo speaks Darija, the oral Moroccan Arabic dialect at home with his family. As it is only an oral language, it is not an official language of Morocco.

• Ito speaks Tamazight with her family. This is one of three Amazigh dialects in Morocco but is still not an officially recognized language.

Primary School

• Simo is taught in Fuhsa, or Modern Standard Arabic. All the textbooks are written in Fuhsa as is the Qu'ran. He begins learning how to read and write using the Arabic script.

• Ito may be taught either in Fuhsa or in Tamazight. In 2003, the government issued a new script, called Tifinagh which would be used to transcribe the three Amazigh dialects. It does not resemble the Arabic or Latin scripts and is read from left to right. Ito begins to learn how to read and write using theTifinagh script even though her older brothers and sisters never learned it, nor did her parents.

Secondary School

• Simo now speaks Darija at home with his friends and family. At school his studies are taught in Fuhsa and he reads and writes the Arabic Script. In high school, he will begin to take French classes, which, besides Arabic, is the other official language of Morocco. With this new language, he will learn to read and write using the Latin Script.

• Ito now speaks Tamazight at home with her friends and family. She is taught in Fuhsa and/or Tamazight, so she probably reads and writes both using theArabic script and the Tifinagh script. If she makes it to high school, she will probably start to learn either French or English at which point she's going to have to figure out the Latin script.

If both Simo and Ito have made it through high school, they probably have various levels of fluency in several of Morocco's main languages: Darija, Fuhsa, Tamazight, and French. As both Darija and the Amazigh dialects are essentially oral languages, they are mostly spoken and rarely written; Fuhsa, on the other hand, is just the opposite-- it is written and studied, but rarely spoken in Morocco
So now you can imagine what kind of struggle these two children have gone through just to get this far. They may come from different regions of Morocco and from families of different socio-economic status, however they are still facing the same predicament: they must attain literacy in a society that celebrates numerous languages but has yet to master a single one.
By the time they get to University, if they're still trucking and want to add one more notch on their belt, they may choose to study English.

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