Casablanca — Casablanca

A third arrangement, and why it is different again

Block D opens on the Maghreb, and the point of putting it after Senegal is that the two look superficially similar and are structurally unlike. **What Morocco shares with Senegal.** French arrived with French rule, remains the language of much business, higher education and administration, and is acquired at school rather than at home. Fluency in it tracks class and schooling. **What is different, and it is decisive.** French has a written competitor with more prestige than itself. Standard Arabic is official, has a fourteen-century literary tradition, a script, a religious role, and a pan-Arab reach. Amazigh is also official since 2011. So French in Morocco is not filling a vacuum in the written register — it is one option among several, and its position is genuinely contested rather than simply inherited. Arabisation policies from the 1960s onwards moved much of schooling into Arabic; subjects at university, particularly scientific and medical ones, largely stayed in French, producing a well-known discontinuity for students who are taught science in Arabic at school and then find it in French at university. That mismatch has been the subject of repeated reform and repeated argument. **And English is arriving.** This is the live development and Leïla's 'ça bouge' is the honest summary. English has gained ground in Moroccan business, in higher education and among young people, for the obvious international reasons, and both Morocco and Algeria have taken steps to expand its place in schooling — Algeria more sharply, as part of a deliberate move away from French. Whether French will hold its position in the Maghreb over the next generation is an open question, and people in the region hold a range of views on whether it should. **What is argued about**, and this course does not adjudicate: whether French is a resource that opens the world or a colonial residue that divides Moroccans by class; whether arabisation served national identity or damaged employment prospects; whether the rise of English is liberation from France or merely a change of dependency; and what place Amazigh should actually occupy now it is official. Moroccan writers and academics argue all of these in both French and Arabic, frequently and in public. **For a visitor, practically.** French works in Casablanca, Rabat and most urban and commercial settings, and the French you hear will often be fluent and fast, with its own accent and a steady seasoning of darija. In rural areas and in the south, Arabic or Amazigh will serve you better than French. English is increasingly useful with younger people. And the single most useful thing is a handful of darija greetings — 'salam', 'labas?', 'shukran', 'bslama' — offered plainly, for the same reason the Wolof greetings mattered in lesson 80.