The Arabic Language

partial francophones for Morocco, and a total of 63.6 per cent francophones for 
Tunisia. According to Benrabah (2007: 112), the number of French speakers in 
Algeria was around 60 per cent in 2004. A recent survey shows that most people 
still feel that their proficiency in spoken and written Standard Arabic is less than 
their skills in French: about 25 per cent of students, and about 35 per cent of 
teachers assess themselves as (very) good in Standard Arabic, as against 55 per 
cent and 70 per cent in French (Ennaji 2002: 78–9).
Tunisia Morocco Algeria
Arabic only 
300,000 
400,000 
100,000
bilinguals 500,000 
700,000 300,000
French only 
100,000 
100,000 
900,000
total 
900,000 1,200,000 1,300,000
20 per cent 
10 per cent 
12 per cent
Table 14.1 Language proficiency of literates in North Africa (after Gallagher 
1968: 148)
Although these figures do not match exactly, they do reflect a reality that still 
obtains in North Africa. There are two prestige languages that compete for the 
same domains: Standard Arabic and French. The colonial past has strongly influ-
enced speakers’ attitudes towards the two languages. Bentahila (1983) studied 
these attitudes with the help of a matched guise technique that has been designed 
to bring out people’s reactions to the use of language varieties. He observed that 
French was generally regarded more favourably than Arabic, provided that it 
was of high quality. Speakers of French were perceived as modern, sophisticated, 
educated and important, whereas the same speakers, when speaking in Arabic, 
were rated higher on features such as sociability and friendliness. Interestingly, 
most of the respondents regarded the use of mixed codes very negatively. Asked 

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268
The Arabic Language
about the advantages of bilingualism, that is, proficiency in both languages, 
two-thirds of the respondents maintained that it is advantageous for both individ-
uals and society, especially in education. Yet most respondents favoured Arabici
-
sation, provided that it was carried out in Classical Arabic, while at the same time 
supporting the continuation of bilingualism. Likewise, almost all respondents 
asserted that Arabic was an appropriate language for the teaching of science, but 
at the same time they preferred the teaching of science in French. Such reactions 
illustrate the deep conflict between people’s attitudes and their ‘official’ point of 
view in a post-colonial bilingual society.
With respect to language choice, the respondents in Bentahila’s study, all of 
whom were bilingual, stated that they spoke predominantly Arabic with elderly 
people, poor people and family, and predominantly French with doctors and 
employers. When ranking the domains of the language varieties, Bentahila found 
that Moroccan Arabic was used least in education and most at home, while French 
was used least among friends and most in education. Among friends, the preferred 
variety was a mixture of Arabic and French.
An interesting contrast is provided by the respondents’ reactions to questions 
about their preferred variety in the written and the spoken media (see Table 
14.2). The comments that accompanied these reactions show the kind of associa
-
tions that people have with the two varieties: French is preferred because of the 
content of messages in French, whereas Arabic is preferred out of a sense of duty 
towards the nation.
s=87 
French mixed Arabic blanks
newspapers read 
37 
53 
15 
4
newspapers preferred 
58 
13 
26 
12
books read 
45 
54 
7 
3
books preferred 
62 
14 
20 
13
radio listened to 
25 
60 
19 
5
radio preferred 
54 
14 
27 
14
television preferred 
55 
26 
20 
8
films preferred 
79 
13 
6 
11
Table 14.2 Preferred language varieties in the media in Morocco (after Benta-
hila 1983: 68, 70)
A more recent survey of language attitudes in Morocco (Ennaji 2002) shows 
that not much has changed in the intervening period. When asked about the 
use of Arabic and French in the sciences, the majority (about 60 per cent) name 
French as the preferred language in (higher) education (as against 25 per cent 
Standard Arabic). About two-thirds of the informants favour Arabic–French bilin-
gualism. For most of the informants, Arabic is a language of the historical legacy 

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Bilingualism 
269
and for the humanities, whereas French represents technology and progress. 
None of the respondents was a proponent of full Arabicisation, and the current 
bilingualism turned out to be the preferred option. Almost no one in this survey 
felt that vernacular Moroccan Arabic could replace either of these two standard 
languages. Some linguists, like Abderrahim Youssi (1995) feel that the best 
solution would be to introduce vernacular Moroccan (
dārija
) in the educational 
system because of its accessibility for much broader circles of the population, but 
they are a minority. The few attempts to use Moroccan Arabic in writing have thus 
far remained without follow-up (see pp. 168f.).
The relative prestige of Standard Arabic is perhaps also visible in the tendency 
on the part of speakers to use hypercorrect standard language. In the media, 
speakers using Standard Arabic pronounce the article in juncture as 
ʾal-
, with full 
realisation of the glottal stop, apparently in an effort to avoid the dialect form 
l-
; 
they also tend to supply declensional endings even in pausal position, where no 
speaker in the eastern Arabic-speaking world would ever use them. Consequently, 
switches in speech are characterised by sharp contrasts, as in the following utter
-
ance taken from a Moroccan radio programme:
wa-ḥaqīqa ʾanna l-mutafarrižīn k-tašfu ʿunṣur mǝn ʿanāṣir l-masraḥ lli ġad-ikun ḥaqīqa 
fǝ-l-mustǝqbal fī mīdān l-masraḥ nažāḥan bāhir
‘Really, the audience discover one of 
the elements of the theatre that in future will have a resounding success in the field 
of theatre’. (Forkel 1980: 93)
or in the following utterance:
ʾaškuru l-ʾaḫ ʿla had l-furṣa lli tutāḥ lī baš nʿǝbbǝr ʿan raʾyī ḥawl dawr l-ʾiḏāʿa
‘I thank my 
colleague for this opportunity granted to me to express my opinion about the role 
of the media’. (Forkel 1980: 85)
The juxtaposition of high-standard expressions and dialect utterances (
ġad-ikun
with aspectual marker; 
nažāḥan
with accusative ending; 
lli
dialect relative; 
tutāḥ
passive verb) is typical of media speech in North Africa.